Dr Alexander Haupt is visiting from Plymouth Business School to lead a seminar on environmental policy and renewable energy. It is taking place on the 9th May 2018 from 16:00 to 17:00 in the Harvard Lecture Theatre (this is located on the ground floor of the David Chiddick Building in the Executive Development Centre)
The renewable energy sector is key to meeting climate policy targets and threatens the market power of conventional fossil-fuel electricity generators. The intermittence of renewable energy sources complicates environmental policy. This paper justifies to some extent the use of feed-in tariffs, capacity taxes and price caps in addition to emission taxes. Feed-in tariffs or capacity taxes might be necessary to counteract strategic overinvestment in conventional fossil-fuel capacities, but this strategic overinvestment can turn into underinvestment if the costs of renewable energy have sufficiently plummeted and the share of customers on time-invariant pricing schemes is sufficiently large. Emission taxes and feed-in tariffs might increase or decrease, as the costs of renewable energy decline, and the paper identifies the circumstances under which these different outcomes result. The analysis is based on a model in which a conventional fossil-fuel electricity producer competes with a potentially large number of renewable energy generators. The fossil-fuel electricity producer might apply different technologies.
For further details please contact Alan Gazzard agazzard@lincoln.ac.uk