Podcasts


How May National Culture Shape Public Policy? The Case of Energy Policy in China

Highlight from the Energy Forum:

  • Philip Andrews-Speed

November 16, 2022

This podcast explores how aspects of national culture may shape the design and implementation of public policy. China's energy policies display a combination of pragmatism, incrementalism, internal contradiction and ambiguity. This is consistent with evidence from experimental psychology and history that the development of Chinese and East Asian cognitive styles has taken a path distinct from those of Western civilisations with their Greek philosophical heritage. Policy implementation also bears features from imperial times in the political culture of China's Communist Party and the contemporary legal system. The podcast draws on a recent paper published in The Energy Journal: How May National Culture Shape Public Policy? The Case of Energy Policy in China.

Philip Andrews-Speed is a Senior Principal Fellow at the Energy Studies Institute, National University of Singapore. He has 40 years in the field of energy and resources, starting his career as a mineral and oil exploration geologist before moving into the field of energy and resource governance. His main research interest has been the political economy of the low-carbon energy transition, with a focus on China.

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How much is reliability of power supply worth in low-income countries? Lessons from Nepal load-shedding crisis.

  • Jevgenijs Steinbuks

October 27, 2022

Many low-income countries have unreliable power supply, yet little is known how much residential households are willing to pay for greater availability of electricity services. This podcast draws on a unique experience of Nepal - a low-income country that has successfully eliminated residential load-shedding after more than a decade-long electricity crisis. Interesting findings emerge from a survey of 4,000 grid-connected households conducted by the World Bank in Nepal less than a year after the residential load shedding had been eliminated. Implications for policymakers are discussed in the end of the podcast.

Jevgenijs Steinbuks is a Senior Economist in the Office of the World Bank Infrastructure Chief Economist. His areas of expertise are in developing and post-communist economies, economic growth, energy and environmental economics, empirical industrial organization, and real estate, urban, and land economics. His current research and policy work focuses on sustainable resource and land use, electric power markets, and infrastructure and economic development. Dr. Steinbuks has extensive experience in academia, public sector, and international institutions.

Before joining the World Bank, he worked as a research economist at the Center for Global Trade Analysis, the Department of Agricultural Economics at Purdue University; the Electricity Policy Research Group, University of Cambridge; the Enterprise Analysis Unit at the World Bank, and Credit Research Center at Georgetown University. He also spent a number of years with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Latvia, working primarily on Latvian economic integration in the EU and WTO. Dr. Steinbuks taught a number of graduate and undergraduate courses in economics at the University of Cambridge, Miami University, the George Washington University, and the University of Latvia. His research is published in peer-reviewed academic journals and is regularly presented at international conferences and workshops. Jevgenijs Steinbuks has his PhD in Economics from the George Washington University.

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Topic: Adaptation and emissions: halo effect or complacency?

  • Walid Marrouch

September 15 2022

The two main tools to address the impacts of greenhouse gases (GHGs) are abatement of emissions and adaptation to climate change. In this context, the option to adapt raises the potential for complacency concerning emission abatement efforts by countries that might adapt or over-adapt. This concern is widely discussed by both policy makers and the nascent theoretical literature on the adaptation-abatement nexus. As it stands, there is no clear consensus about the impact of adaptation efforts on emission abatement.

In our study, we provide the first empirical evidence on the relation between adaptation and emissions. We specifically test whether adaptation affect emissions in a world where adaptation funds are available. We consider several measures of emissions such as CO2 emissions, per capita CO2 emissions, dollar CO2 emissions, CO2 intensity, as well as methane, nitrous oxide and other greenhouse gases. Specifically, we apply a difference-in-differences analysis where we compare the emissions of developing countries that received adaptation funding relative to other developing countries that did not receive such funding before and after the fund approval. We find that receiving adaptation funding significantly and negatively affects all measures of CO2 emissions except CO2 intensity, providing preliminary evidence of the presence of a halo effect of adaptation funding.

As it was clear since the adaptation option was first discussed at the international level, policymakers have been hesitant to emphasize it at the risk of upsetting emissions abatement efforts. We thus show that such fears can be alleviated by the fact that enhanced adaptation does not induce additional emissions; on the contrary, in many instances, adaptation leads to lower emissions.

Walid Marrouch is a professor of economics at the Lebanese American University (LAU). His main research interests are in environmental and resource economics, energy economics, development economics, and applied game theory. His core publication agenda looks into questions that overlap the fields of energy and resource economics, and the economics of international environmental governance, specifically related to climate change. He is a fellow at the Center for Interuniversity Research and Analysis of Organizations (CIRANO) in Montreal, and the Economic Research Forum (ERF).

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Topic: Is the Hamada beta adjustment reasonable for the estimation of the utility cost of capital?

Highlight from the Energy Forum: "The Hamada Beta Adjustment and the Cost of Capital for the Regulated Utilities"

  • Zhen Zhu

September 15 2022

In more recent years, utility cost of capital experts tend to employ the Hamada beta adjustment in estimating the cost of equity in utility rate proceedings. This podcast explains what the Hamada beta adjustment is and demonstrates that the adjustment as applied in rate proceedings leads to inflated beta values and thus higher expected cost of equity than it should be. It argues that the method as applied is fundamentally flawed and the jurisdictional authorities should disregard the method completely.

Zhen Zhu is Professor of Economics at University of Central Oklahoma. He has been teaching energy related courses such as Oil and Gas Economics, International Energy Markets, Natural Gas Investment and Valuation, Energy Trading and Risk Management at UCO and University of Oklahoma. Zhen Zhu is also a Managing Consultant with C.H. Guernsey and Company in Oklahoma City. He worked on projects related to electric and gas utility planning, load forecasts, risk management, and many more. He has testified before a number of state utility commissions concerning electric and gas utility cost of capital, integrated resource planning and gas pricing issues representing consumer advocacy groups, state agencies and the U.S. Department of Defense, among others.

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Topic: What made Britain's power sector carbon emissions fall by two-thirds?

Highlight from the Energy Forum: "Overlapping policies and British electricity decarbonisation"

  • Richard Green and Iain Staffell

August 25 2022

In just seven years, carbon emissions from electricity generation in Great Britain fell from 161 million tonnes of CO2 in 2012 to just 53 million tonnes in 2019. In a paper recently published in Joule, (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joule.2021.09.011) Richard Green and Iain Staffell showed that Shapley values can be used to attribute these reductions across the large number of overlapping changes that happened over the period – additions to renewable capacity, closures of coal plants (for regulatory and other reasons), rising carbon prices and falling demand, among others. In this podcast, they talk about their approach, its findings, and how the method may be used in other contexts.

Richard Green is Professor of Sustainable Energy Business at Imperial College Business School. An economist, he has been researching the economics and regulation of electricity markets for over thirty years. He is a past member of IAEE Council and a past Chair of the British Institute of Energy Economics.

Iain Staffell is a Senior Lecturer in Sustainable Energy at the Centre for Environmental Policy, Imperial College London. He is co-developer of the Renewables.ninja (https://www.renewables.ninja/), an open web platform that lets you simulate the hourly power output from wind and solar power plants located anywhere in the world. Iain also leads the Electric Insights (https://electricinsights.co.uk/) project, an interactive website and quarterly report on the supply, demand, price and environmental impacts of Britain's electricity. 

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Topic: How does climate change affect China?

Highlight from the Energy Forum

  • Marc Gronwald

August 4, 2022

This podcast addresses the following question: How does climate change affect China? It is based on current research of the presenter in the area of climate econometrics as well as a contribution to the March 2022 issue of IAEE’s newsletter “Energy Forum”.

The answer to the question is: it depends - on which part of China one is interested in. There is not only regional heterogeneity in the extent to which temperatures already increased, the different regions in China face very different challenges, ranging from increased exposure to heatwaves to increases in flood and draught risk.

Marc Gronwald is a Senior Associate Professor in Economics at International Business School Suzhou, Xi’an-Jiaotong Liverpool University.

He obtained a diploma (master equivalent) degree in Economics from the University of Bielefeld, and his PhD in Economics from the University of Hamburg.

Prior to his appointment at IBSS, Marc Gronwald held appointments as Senior Lecturer in Economics at the University of Aberdeen, and as Economist at the ifo Institute for Economic Research, Munich. He is member (fellow) of the CESifo Research Network and Research Associate of the ifo Center for Energy, Climate and Exhaustible Resources.

Marc Gronwald’s research focuses on empirical analyses of commodity and financial markets, in particular crude oil markets, emissions trading schemes such as the EU ETS, and markets for cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. He is particularly interested in co-movement of time series. Recently, he also began working in the area of climate econometrics: the application of econometric methods to improve the understanding of the interaction of human activity and climate change.

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Topic: Financing Climate Change Mitigation Using Green Sukuk

Highlight from the Energy Forum

  • Dina Azhgaliyeva

July 21, 2022

Green bonds received high popularity and are widely known. This podcast is about another green financial instrument - Green Sukuk. Green sukuk, a Shari’ah-compliant financial instrument that is designed to fund environmentally friendly projects. Green sukuk, a green Islamic financial instrument, has the potential to unlock investments in climate change mitigation and adaptation, particularly access to private and international finance from responsible investors with green investment targets.

Dina Azhgaliyeva joined ADBI as a Research Fellow in July 2019. Her research focuses on energy policy, particularly renewable energy, energy efficiency, and energy storage. Dina has published articles on these topics in journals such as Energy Economics, Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Australasian Journal of Environmental Management, Journal of Environmental Management, Energy Policy, and Journal of Sustainable Finance & Investment. She earned her PhD and MSc in economics from the University of Essex (United Kingdom). She also holds an internationally recognized teaching qualification from the Fellow of Higher Education Academy and a qualification in research career management from the Staff Educational and Development Association.

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Topic: Estimating the Effects of Global Warming on Energy Use Around the World

  • Ishan Nath and Ashwin Rode

July 14, 2022

Energy use for cooling and heating plays a crucial role in our ability to cope with extreme temperatures. How will a warmer future climate affect global energy expenditures? Recent research from the Climate Impact Lab published in Nature reveals a deep divide between rich and poor populations that is likely to persist as the planet warms. While populations in rich countries are projected to save money by avoiding heating costs during winter, poor populations in the tropics will struggle to protect themselves from rising temperatures, as they remain unable to afford energy-intensive cooling technologies such as air-conditioning.

Ishan Nath is an economist working on topics related to climate change, growth, trade, and development. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the International Economics Section at Princeton, and will join the research department at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco in July, 2022. Ishan completed his PhD in economics from the University of Chicago in 2019, where he stayed for a two-year postdoctoral fellowship with the Climate Impact Lab and the Energy Policy Institute at Chicago. Previously, Ishan completed a B.A. in Economics and a B.S. in Earth Systems at Stanford, and an MPhil in Economics at Oxford, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar. When he is not thinking about economics, Ishan can be found either playing, watching, or talking about basketball. 

Dr. Ashwin Rode is a director of scientific research at Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago and an investigator in the Climate Impact Lab. He received an A.B. in Economics from the University of Chicago, an M.S. in Economics from the University of Texas at Austin, and a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

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Topic: Methane Emissions Measurement: How to Reestablish Trust in the Numbers

  • Erin Blanton

June 23, 2022

The oil and gas sector accounts for 40% of methane emissions worldwide and we know that our current methods of accounting for those emissions are not accurate. For gas to have a meaningful role in low-carbon, low-cost energy systems, methane emissions must be accurately measured and effectively reduced. In this podcast, Erin Blanton, Executive Director of Future Energy Systems at the Gas Technology Institute (GTI), outlines efforts to improve the measurement of methane emissions from the oil and gas industry so that we can more effectively accelerate efforts to reduce them.

Erin Blanton is Executive Director of Future Energy Systems at GTI, where she leads GTI's methane emissions mitigation solutions strategy and is building a new program focused on the role of natural gas infrastructure in facilitating energy transitions and supporting a net-zero future. Erin joined GTI from Columbia University's Center on Global Energy Policy, where she led the Natural Gas Research Initiative and the Center's ESG research as a senior research scholar. There, her work focused on the role of natural gas in energy transitions and energy markets and investment. She has also written extensively on best practices for oil and gas ESG investing.

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Topic: Carbon pricing and international transfers: financing the transition of the energy system in developing economies.

  • Rafael Garaffa

June 2, 2022

An urgent decarbonisation of the energy systems Is required to tackle the effects of global warming. Financing the transition to a low-carbon economy is a core aspect for most countries. Carbon pricing is a cost-effective policy instrument to internalize the costs of climate damage into prices. Carbon revenues can help on financing this transition, but the design of the policy mix can have important implications to households.

Rafael Garaffa is a climate change policy analyst and researcher for the European Commission, Joint Research Centre (JRC) in Seville. He is an Economist (Instituto de Economia/UFRJ) and holds a DSc in Energy Planning from COPPE, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (COPPE/UFRJ).

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Topic: The Impact of Capacity Market Auctions on Wholesale Electricity Prices

Highlight from the Energy Journal

  • Francisco Moraiz and Dominic Scott

May 12, 2022

This podcast discusses the findings on our recently published paper at the Energy Journal, titled “The Impact of Capacity Market Auctions on Wholesale Electricity Prices” (Vol. 43, No. 1). The objective of this analysis is to shed light on the impact-on electricity prices and net costs borne by the consumer-of the introduction of the Capacity Market.

Dominic Scott, senior adviser at the Regulatory Assistance Project, and Francisco Moraiz, a senior economist in British energy regulator Ofgem, shed further light on the background behind the work, as well as outline the method employed, results and their interpretation. The paper and accompanying podcast are presented in a personal capacity.

Dominic is a senior adviser in the Regulatory Assistance Project - an independent, non-partisan, non-governmental organization dedicated to accelerating the transition to a clean, reliable, and efficient energy future. Dominic also lectures energy economics and policy at the University of Reykjavik. Prior to that, he worked for 10 years in the British civil service, in the energy ministry (now the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy), the competition authority (now the Competition and Markets Authority) and the energy regulator Ofgem. Mr. Scott is an economist with degrees from the London School of Economics and Trinity College Dublin. 

Francisco Moraiz works as a senior economist for Ofgem, the Energy Regulator in Great Britain. He is responsible for quantitative analysis, impact assessments and evaluations.  Prior to this, he worked for the Department of Energy and Climate Change (now the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy), consultancy and academia. He has many years of experience managing complex analytical projects.

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Topic: Oil price volatility is effective in predicting food price volatility. Or is it?

Highlight from the Energy Journal

  • George Filis

April 24, 2022

This podcast discusses the findings on our recently published paper at the Energy Journal, titled “Oil price volatility is effective in predicting food price volatility. Or is it?” (Vol. 42, No. 6). The relationship between the food and energy markets is well documented in the literature. Despite these findings, we show that oil price volatility cannot systematically improve forecasts for agricultural price volatility. We offer an array of plausible reasons for such findings.

Dr. George Filis is Assistant Professor of International Economics at the Department of Economics, at the University of Patras. He holds a PhD in Finance from Bournemouth University, UK. His research interests revolve mainly around the Energy Finance and Economics, Energy Forecasting and the Economics of the Financial Markets. His research has received funding from Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme of the European Commission. He has also served as a consultant for the US Energy Information Administration and the Bank of Greece on issues related to the oil market. His research has been published in the Energy Journal, Energy Economics, Economics Letters, Journal of International Money and Finance, International Journal of Forecasting and Journal of Empirical Finance, among others.

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Topic: Economic and Environmental Consequences of Market Power in the South-East Europe Regional Electricity Market

Highlight from the Energy Journal

  • Afzal Siddiqui

April 6, 2022

The South-East Europe Regional Electricity Market (SEE-REM) comprises both EU members subject to the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS) emission cap and non-EU members exempt from it. As such, EU carbon policy has the potential to lead to carbon leakage, i.e., increased carbon emissions in non-ETS states due to a tighter ETS emission cap. Vis-à-vis perfect competition, the exercise of market power by a dominant ETS firm with a non-renewable portfolio could increase carbon leakage in the medium term by simultaneously boosting the electricity price and depressing the ETS emission-permit price. Hence, the European Commission's carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) to mitigate this problem should take strategic behaviour by domestic and foreign firms into consideration.

For more insight into this topic, please see Economic and Environmental Consequences of Market Power in the South-East Europe Regional Electricity Market by Verena Viskovic, Yihsu Chen, Afzal S. Siddiqui, and Makoto Tanaka, which was published in The Energy Journal, Volume 43 Number 6.

Afzal Siddiqui is a Professor in the Department of Computer and Systems Sciences at Stockholm University. He is also an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Systems Analysis at Aalto University. Previously, he was Professor of Energy Economics in the Department of Statistical Science at University College London and a Visiting Professor in the Department of Decision Sciences at HEC Montréal. His research interests are in the application of operational research methods to analyse decision making under uncertainty and competition in the energy sector. Besides participation in and coordination of several research projects, he has also served as a consultant to the Energy Technologies Area of the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Directorate-General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology (DG CONNECT) of the European Commission.

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Topic: The Negative Pricing of the May 2020 WTI Crude Oil Futures Contract

  • Adrian Fernandez-Perez

March 28, 2022

On April 20, 2020, the price of the May 2020 NYMEX WTI crude oil futures contract dropped to -$37.63 per barrel. This podcast investigates the plausible reasons behind this unprecedented event from a different perspective. In my podcast, I will explain the macroeconomic and geopolitical antecedents, the inventories and futures markets activities that preceded the negative price event, and finally, I will exonerate the United States Oil fund (USO) as the trigger of the negative price. This podcast is built upon the paper: “The Negative Pricing of the May 2020 WTI Crude Oil Futures Contract”, co-authored with Prof. Joelle Miffre (Audencia Business School, France) and Prof. Ana-Maria Fuertes (Bayes Business School, UK), and recently published in the Energy Journal.

Dr. Adrian Fernandez-Perez is from a small island called Gran Canaria (Spain) where he did his PhD in Economics. He is Senior Research Fellow at Auckland Centre for Financial Research (Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand). His research focuses on the pricing of commodities and behavioral finance. His articles are published in leading academic journals such as the Journal of Financial Economics, Review of Finance, Journal of Banking and Finance or the Energy Journal, among others. As testimonies of the relevance of his research to the industry, his work is featured in media and practitioners' journals (Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Harvard Business Review, USA Today, Global Commodities Applied Research Digest, Hedge Funds Review, Investment and Pension Europe, or The Conversation), and was awarded grants from financial market participants such as INQUIRE UK, BA/Leverhulme or AFAANZ.He is also member of the Editorial Advisory Board of the Global Commodities Applied Research Digest.

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Topic: Energy poverty in the European context

  • Elisa Trujillo-Baute

March 9, 2022

The starting premise in the analysis of energy poverty is that the transition to a new socially just energy model must be shaped by tools that respond to social consequences. This podcast responds to relevant questions linked to the definition and measurement of energy poverty, its main causes and effects, the assessment of the problem magnitude, actions taken and mechanisms for tackling energy poverty and the potential for improvement with new tools in the fight against this problem.

Elisa Trujillo-Baute is a PhD in economics from the University of Barcelona, Serra Hunter Fellow (Reader) at the University of Lleida and senior researcher at the Barcelona Institute of Economics. She has participated in numerous national and international projects developed within the field of applied economics oriented to the evaluation of public policies and regulation of the energy sector in the context of European countries. Her contributions related to the analysis of the energy transition are classified into three lines of research: markets, networks and poverty. The market line studies the effect of the transition on retail prices (Trujillo-Baute, E. et. Al. 2018; Costa-Campi, MT et. Al. 2016; Costa-Campi, M.T. & Trujillo-Baute, E. 2015) and wholesalers (Batalla, J. et. Al. 2019; Grossi, L. et. Al. 2018; Batalla, J. & Trujillo-Baute, E. 2016) of energy. On the other hand, network research analyzes the impact that the commitment to a greater use of renewable energies has on the efficiency of the system, in terms of the losses they generate (Costa-Campi, et. Al. 2018) and the effect of these in CO2 emissions (Daví, D. et. al. 2017), and in terms of how the location of new renewable influence the energy efficiency (congestion) of the networks (Costa-Campi, MT et. al. 2020a & 2021). Finally, the youngest line is that of energy poverty, which studies the social justice component of the energy transition, with emphasis on the analysis of its determinants (Costa-Campi, MT et. Al. 2020b) and on the scope of the effect of alternative policies (via income or energy efficiency) to combat energy poverty.

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Topic: Auctions for supporting renewable energy sources: some advantages and challenges

  • Ali Darudi

February 24, 2022

Currently auction is the most rapidly spreading renewable support policy. In 2017 and 2018 alone, auctions were used to incentivize investments in a total of 107 GW of wind and PV capacity globally, promising an increase of ~10% in their capacity. In this podcast, I briefly cover the following issues: why do we need to support renewables and what are advantages of using auctions? What are main challenges with auctions? I also talk about non-realization penalties, implications of having investors who bid based on the real option value, and finally remuneration scheme trade-offs.

Ali Darudi is a postdoctoral researcher at the Research Center for Sustainable Energy and Water Management (FoNEW), University of Basel, Switzerland. His main areas of research are renewable support policy design, market design for a decarbonized electricity sector, and electric mobility. He has also been involved in carrying out resource adequacy studies for the Swiss Federal Office of Energy. Appreciating the challenges of working in a multidisciplinary field such as the energy sector, he complemented his bachelor's and master's degrees in Electrical Engineering with a PhD in Energy Economics, hoping to further bridge different aspects of the sector.

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Topic: Power system flexibility enhancements for the decarbonization with high integration of renewable energy: the case of European islands

  • Sophie Chlela

February 10, 2022

This podcast discusses power system flexibility with a focus on a set of well-proven solutions that will ensure the integration of high amounts of renewable energy for the decarbonization of energy systems. The showcased solutions are storage, demand-side management (including demand-response) and electric vehicle charging control. Particular focus is made on challenges and opportunities for islands where this requirement becomes relevant especially that they have limited (or no) interconnections to the continent. Hence, relying on flexibility options would ensure the secure and cost-efficient operation of their energy system. The methodology used for exploring decarbonization pathways is also presented: it concerns prospective modeling based on techno-economic optimization of TIMES model generator, a methodological corpus developed within the IEA-ETSAP (https://iea-etsap.org/). It implies the integration of technical, economic and policy aspects of the plausible evolution of power systems. A brief presentation of the H2020 GIFT- Geographical Islands FlexibiliTy project is also included since it is in relation to the topic and the study.

Sophie Chlela is a PhD student at the Centre for Applied Mathematics (CMA) of MINES ParisTech in Sophia Antipolis, France where she completed a postmaster degree in Energy Systems Optimization. In her role as master student, she worked on her master thesis under the supervision of Prof. Sandrine Selosse (CMA), on power systems flexibility. It included developing long-term energy planning with the integration of the innovative solutions necessary for reliable islands’ power systems. Her current research work includes the achievement of net zero emissions on the global level.

She holds a BE in Mechanical Engineering from Notre Dame University-Louaize, Lebanon and a MSc in Renewable Energy from Ecole Polytechnique, Palaiseau, France. She has gained knowledge in sustainable development policies with her previous work as a research assistant with the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (UN ESCWA).

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Topic: Carbon emissions: the truth is more scary than you think

  • Bjørn Brochmann and Stig Schjølset

January 27, 2022

Over the last 30 years, since 1990, annual global carbon emissions have increased 60 %. The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is now so high that we are doomed to experience both 1,5 degree and later 2 degrees warmer climate, even if we are able to reduce global emissions back to the 1990 level.

It is too late to avoid plus 1,5 degrees. The concentration in the air is already there. But plus 2 degrees could still be avoided. That requires, however, extraordinary efforts, since emissions will need to drop, not to the 1990 level, but all the way down to zero within 20-30 years.

Bjørn S. Brochmann was chairman of the Norwegian affiliate of IAEE between 1994 – 1997. His energy related career includes positions within Statoil (now Equinor), the oil division of Norsk Hydro, Point Carbon and Thomson Reuters, all in all more than 30 years in the energy business.

Stig Schjølset is head of policy at ZERO, a Norwegian NGO working to speed up the green transition. He has previously been a special adviser on green growth to the Norwegian government. He has also extensive experience from international energy markets, and was heading up the carbon analysis team in Point Carbon Thomson Reuters for several years.

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Topic: Energy efficiency in building & sustainability goals: Huge untapped potential

  • Fateh Belaid

January 13, 2022

This podcast discusses the role of building energy efficiency in shaping the sustainability path.

Fateh Belaid is a research fellow at King Abdullah Petroleum Studies and Research Center. Before joining KAPSARC, he was a full Professor of Economics at Lille Catholic University, Director of the Smart & Sustainable Cities research unit, with appointments in Ecole des Ponts & Chaussées ParisTech, and Ecole Nationale des Sciences Géographiques.

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Topic: Cyclicities in Crude Oil Prices

  • Xiaoyi Mu

December 16, 2021

Oil prices are cyclical. Are we at the start of a new super-cycle? This podcast builds upon and updates the paper "Small Trends and Big Cycles in Crude Oil Prices" that was published at the Energy Journal (Vol 36, No. 1). In this podcast I'll briefly expound the cyclicities in crude oil prices based on an unobserved components model, and provide an update on the forecasting performance using data from 2011-2020. The key take-away is that it is important to take the cyclicities into account when modelling long-term oil prices.

Dr Xiaoyi (Shawn) Mu is a Reader in Energy Economics at Centre for Energy, Petroleum and Mineral Law and Policy (CEPMLP). He joined the centre in 2008 as a Lecture and promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2012 and Reader in 2016. Before joining the Centre, between 2006 and 2008, he was a Senior Consultant at Global Energy Decisions (now ABB Ventyx) in California, providing advisory services on electricity prices and asset valuation of power plants. From 1994 to 2000, he worked as an analyst and manager at the headquarters of China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) and PetroChina, engaged in strategic planning and coordination of marketing activities in the refining and marketing division, and crude oil sales and planning at the natural gas and pipelines division.

Dr Mu is a member of International Association for Energy Economics (IAEE) and won two Best Student Paper Awards (first places) in its international and North American Conferences. His research interest includes commodity pricing and volatility, industrial organization and strategies of energy companies, regulation and restructuring of energy industries, and China's energy policy. Dr Mu's papers have been appeared in such journals as Economic Inquiry, Energy Economics, Energy Journal, Energy Policy, and Journal of Industrial Economics.

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Topic: What happened on the gas markets? Is it a new energy shock?

  • Zied Ftiti

December 2, 2021

During 2021 the gas prices jumped up and attain some record level, especially in Europe. This podcast aims to explain the main driver of gasp prices dynamics observed during the last three years and having various trends. This period of analysis might be considered on three sub-periods: before COVID-19, COVID-19 crisis and post COVDI-19 crisis. We show that gas prices have been impacted by endogenous as well as exogenous factors.

Zied Ftiti is full professor of Financial Economics and Head of the Research Center (OCRE), and Associate Dean of Research at EDC Paris Business School. After completing his Master’s degree in Money, Finance and International Economics (Option of Applied Macroeconomics) at University of Lyon 2, he has obtained his PhD in Economics in University of Lyon (GATE Laboratory, CNRS-UMR 5824) and a PhD in Business in the University of Tunis, High Institute of Management. In 2013, he has obtained Habilitation for Supervising Doctoral Research in management sciences, from University of Tunis, and in 2019 he obtained Habilitation for supervising doctoral in Economics in University of Cergy-Pontoise. His research area includes Financial Econometrics, Econometrics, Financial Markets, Monetary Economics, and Macroeconomics. Prof. Zied Ftiti has published books and many papers in top-tier journals such as Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Econometric Reviews, Annals of Operations Research, Applied Economics, Journal of International Monetary and Finance, Energy Journal, Energy Policy, Energy Economics, Quarterly Review of Economics & Finance, Economic Modelling, Economic Systems, Journal of Economic Integration, European Journal of Comparative Economics, Emerging Market Review, Open Economic Review, Applied Economics Letters, Finance Research Letters, International Review of Financial Analysis, Pacific-Basin Finance Journal, Bankers, Markets & Investors, Energy Studies Review, etc. Prof. Zied Ftiti is organizer of the Financial Economic Meeting conference. He is Associate Editor of the Bankers, Markets & Investors (ranked two stars in CNRS ranking and the journal of the first Finance Association AFII in French). He has acted as guest editor for high quality international journals in economics and finance, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization (ABS 3*), International Journal of Finance and Economics (ABS 3*), Annals of Operational Research (3*), Bankers Markets &Investors (CNRS 2*), Computational Economics (ABS 1*), Energy Journal (ABS 3*); among others such Journal of Risk and Financial Management, Sustainability, etc. 

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Topic: Do we move forward towards an integrative perspective on the complex energy ecosystem?

  • Aikaterini Poustourli

November 17, 2021

People need access to energy for a good life. But in a world where fossil fuels are the dominant source of energy, access to modern energy means that carbon emissions are too high. Around three-quarters of global greenhouse gas emissions come from the burning of fossil fuels for energy. To reduce global emissions, we need to shift our energy systems away from fossil fuels to low-carbon sources of energy. We need to ‘decarbonize’. The global challenge is to find large-scale energy alternatives to fossil fuels that are affordable, safe and sustainable.

Over the past 50 years, the use of nuclear power has reduced carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by over 60 gigatons, nearly two years’ worth of global energy-related emissions.

By examining and understanding the different perspectives on resolving the gaps between energy supply, consumption, grid transfer capacity, storage, distribution, energy networks, security, interoperability, smart metering deployment, digitalization and blockchain, cybersecurity, cogeneration (CHP), recycling innovations, patents and intellectual property, public-private partnerships and hybrid systems, we identify the complexity of the energy ecosystem as a multi-layer and interdependent system composed of technical, economic, social and geopolitical aspects. Could be fusion the way forward? Could be Solar Power from Space the main solution? Could be Hydrogen a critical enabler of the global transition to sustainable energy, and a key part of net-zero emissions economies?

The provision of continuous and systematic scientific advice is needed in order to support the global governance and decision-making due to the complexity of challenges in the energy transformation. Epistemic diversity is critical forbringing a broad range of aspects and perspectives into the debate. Furthermore,Standardisation and standards as a common language tool, could contribute not only in the valorisation of energy innovations but also in the sustainability of successful interoperable integrative solutions. The energy transition involves decentralised decisions by thousands of actors like cities, energy using companies, grid owners, regulatory agencies, the financial sector, citizens, energy communities, and many others, all of which should have access to, and provide input into the foundations of the energy transition. The Standardisation ecosystem could help to that direction. Technical Committees, international fora and consultation-based instruments could ensure polyphony, epistemic diversity and a broad stakeholders’ participation and thus an integrated and collaborative perspective to achieve a clean energy transition.

Dr. Katerina Poustourli is a Scientific/Technical Officer of the International Hellenic University. She is a senior scientist who dealt with the dimensions of quality, safety and security, energy and environment, conformity assessment throughout the length of her career-path and in particular in testing labs, in industry, consultant services, research, public administration and policy making. She is certified as ISO MSS Lead Auditor for many certification schemes. She was the initiator for the organization and implementation of Energy Inspectors Seminars who have the authority to suggest the issuance of Buildings’ Energy Performance Certificates, on behalf of her body of origin (TEIoCM). As Adjunct Professor used to teach safety and energy-oriented courses in Higher Education and vocational centers. Her will to support the EU research and policies relative to Secure Societies, Critical Infrastructures Protection, Security Standardisation and Citizens Engagement brought her to the European Commission, in Italy (EC DG JRC) and Belgium (EC DG HOME B4) respectively for a four years total service as national expert. She is a member of national, European and international standardization Technical Committees and H2020 advisory consortia. Energy transition and Green Tech are her current scientific interests in the light of smart cities and critical infrastructures. She is an advocate of holistic and interdisciplinary approaches in research & innovation, administration and policy-making.

Dr. Katerina Poustourli received her PhD in Robust Engineering in 2011 from the National Technical University of Athens, and her integrated MSc and Bachelor in Production & Management Engineering from the Technical University of Crete in 1992. She also gained a Postgraduate Diploma in Design Thinking and Innovation by Emeritus MIT in 2020.

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Topic: Revisiting Electricity Market Design in the Context of Large-scale Penetration of Intermittent Renewables

  • Frank Felder

November 5, 2021

This podcast discusses the integration of technical, economic, and political economy issues in the context of designing wholesale electricity markets with large amounts of variable or intermittent renewable resources such as wind and solar. Linking reliability, market design, and political questions is critical to both understand ongoing developments and to improve outcomes. Although the context is U.S. Regional Transmission Operator/Independent System Operator (RTO/ISO) markets, the issues and themes also apply to other market and regulatory approaches in the power sector. Advancements in modeling technical, economic, and political economy questions are underway to provide additional insights into these topics.

Frank Felder is an engineer, energy policy analyst, and Program Director for Energy Transitions and Electric Power. Prior to joining KAPSARC, Frank was a Research Professor at the School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University, Director of the Rutgers Energy Institute, and Director of the Center for Energy, Economics and Environmental Policy. In those roles, he conducted original and applied research in the areas of electric power system modeling, clean energy policies, and climate change for academic foundations, government agencies, and energy utilities. He has also worked as an economic consultant and nuclear engineer.

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Topic: The Texas Electric Grid Failure

  • Edward Hirs

October 20, 2021

In 2013, we forecast how the Texas grid under the ERCOT market would fail by examining the economic underpinnings of the market design. Unfortunately, we were correct, and a catastrophe that could have been averted has cost hundreds of lives and more than $100 billion in economic damages. This podcast summarizes how we arrived here and what we know to date.

Ed Hirs is a Co-Founder of Zero Carbon Cycle LLC, a renewable diesel company, UH Energy Fellow at the University of Houston where he teaches energy economics, advisory director to quant-driven hedge fund OIS Capital, and advisory director to the wine and spirits importer BCI Bonneté. Ed is an advisory director to the Energy Industries Council and a director of the French American Chamber of Commerce-Texas. Ed is a Forbes contributor and Energy Expert for KHOU TV in Houston. He is widely quoted and an internationally recognized energy economist writing on energy markets, the energy transition and ESG considerations. He founded and co-chairs an annual energy conference at Yale University.

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Topic: Barriers to carbon capture and storage

  • Snorre Kverndokk

October 7, 2021

Several scenarios and economic studies focus on carbon capture and storage (CCS) as a key technology for reaching the climate targets described by the Paris agreement. In this podcast, I go through several possible reasons why investments in CCS have not been in line with these scenarios. In particular, I focus on market imperfections in the value chain of CCS based on a recent study I have conducted with my colleagues Rolf Golombek, Mags Greaker and Lin Ma.

Link to the paper: The Transition to Carbon Capture and Storage Technologies | Publication | CESifo

Snorre Kverndokk (born 1962) has his Ph.D. in environmental economics from the University of Oslo in 1994. He is a senior research fellow at the Frisch Centre, a research foundation at the University of Oslo, and has also work experience from Department of Economics University of Oslo, Statistics Norway and Johns Hopkins University SAIS (Washington DC and Bologna, Italy), in addition to experience from governmental work and consulting. He is working on health-, energy- and environmental economics, and has previously been the director of CREE - Oslo Centre for Research on Environmentally friendly Energy, and HERO - Health Economics Program at the University of Oslo. He has also been involved in IPCC WG III since 1998 as a lead author and a review editor. He has had several research stays in England, Belgium and the USA, and has published numerous articles in international journals and received awards for his research. He is basically doing theoretical analyses and numerical modelling.

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Topic: Energy Dialectic Reasoning and Global Climate Change Solutions

  • Doug Reynolds

September 23, 2021

The importance of climate change must be considered when comparing current energy solutions for the economy. This podcast reveals the four major Hegelian energy dialectics of human history and how they pertain to global climate change energy choices. Using the famous bet between Julian Lincoln Simon and Paul Ralph Ehrlich, an explanation of their results shows how to interpret that debate in the context of carbon neutral policies. The question remains how best to solve energy dilemmas.

Doug Reynolds, Ph.D. Economics, was a professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks where he developed an economic model for a large Alaskan LNG project, helped to design Alaskan fiscal system allocations, and conducted price inflation analyses for Alaska's North Slope. He also worked, taught in and studied the former Soviet Union, China and many other energy consuming and producing countries around the world. His publication record includes multiple books, articles and reports.

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Topic: How to achieve hydrogen society

  • Chan Kung

September 9, 2021

Are lithium batteries conducive to the emergence a of hydrogen energy society? What makes the green automobile industry really meaningful? What role will hydrogen fuel engines play in reducing carbon and controlling pollution? Chan Kung addresses these questions in this podcast.

Chan Kung is the Founder of ANBOUND Think Tank (established in 1993). Mr. Chan Kung is a well-known authoritative expert in the field of information analysis in China. He is also the author of The Art of Analysis, published in 1990s, and The Core of Information Analysis, published in 2010. Through these works on information analysis, Mr. Chan Kung has laid a solid empirical theoretical foundation for China's information analysis discipline.

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Topic: Electricity Market Restructuring and Retail Rates

  • Brittany Tarufelli

August 19, 2021

Between 1996 and 2000, 13 U.S. states and the District of Columbia passed electricity market “restructuring”—applying market rules to power suppliers and consumers to increase competition. In this podcast, I discuss how restructuring affected electricity prices for final consumers versus those in rate-regulated states. I provide evidence that restructuring temporarily increased rates, and discuss plausible mechanisms—including the effect of natural gas prices on retail rates—that have policy implications for continuing changes in electricity market design.

See the related USAEE working paper at: USAEE Working Paper No. 20-462

See related electricity market design and climate policy working papers here, and here.

Brittany Tarufelli is an applied microeconomist studying relationships between public policy, energy markets, and the environment. Her research evaluates the ongoing transition to clean energy, focusing on interactions between sub-global environmental policies and energy market designs. Brittany currently works at Louisiana State University’s Center for Energy Studies and will join the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in September 2021.

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Topic: Pigou and the Poor: Why Carbon Pricing might not be the right climate policy for Africa

  • Jörg Peters

August 5, 2021

Carbon pricing is often proclaimed to be the go-to climate policy by economists, also for the Global South. With a specific focus on Africa, I contend that a modest carbon price is unlikely to be effective. Moreover, higher carbon prices might have considerable poverty lock-in effects, not by hitting the poor (for they don’t consume formalized energy services) but by hitting those people hardest who have just developed out of energy poverty, the ‘transitional poor’.

Jörg Peters is co-heading the research department “Climate & Development” at RWI – Leibniz Institute for Economic Research in Germany. Jörg has done research on energy access and environmental policies in various West and East African countries, including intensive field work. He has also worked with several international organisations and governmental agencies in the power sector.

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Topic: How energy economists contribute to a river visioning process

  • Jouni Räihä

July 22, 2021

The value of hydropower as a balancing resource is amplified as increasing amounts of variable generation are introduced into the market. On the other hand, the ecological impacts associated with hydropower are also given more attention, and different viewpoints cause friction. Visioning the future of a river that brings together a vast area should account for many divergent issues. In this Podcast, I shed light on what economists can do to assist such a process.

Jouni Räihä is a researcher at the Finnish Environment Institute and a doctoral student at the Oulu Business School. His research interests include various energy use in buildings and electricity market low-carbon transition-related topics. His Master's thesis focusing on residential heating system choice analysis was awarded the recognition as the best of Finland in energy economics for the academic year 2018-2019 by the Finnish Association of Energy Economists.

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Topic: Electric Vehicle Charging: Implications for users and networks

  • Julia Lopez

July 1, 2021

The charging of electric vehicles has been traditionally studied using three different approaches: Uncontrolled charging, Direct control charging and indirect control charging. Each of them has pros and cons and can be suitable for particular set-ups. This podcasts reviews charging strategies for electric vehicles and highlights their implications in terms of distributions grids and user acceptance.

Julia Lopez is a Doctoral Candidate at the Boysen - TU Dresden Research training group and the chair of Energy Economics at the Dresden University of Technology. Her research focuses on electric vehicles charging and its impacts on distribution grids. Julia holds a MSc in Public Economics from the University of Leicester and a BSc in Electrical Engineering from the National University of Colombia. Julia was previously involved in Energy policy making at the Colombian Ministry of Energy and Minery. She has held positions at the Colombian Power exchange and the Scottish renewable energy development sector.

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Topic: IOCs and the Energy Transition: Rethinking "Business as Usual"?

  • Mariana Liakopoulou and Brad Handler

June 17, 2021

This podcast aims to review how climate action could impact the traditional corporate approach of International Oil Companies (IOCs), seeking to maximize value for shareholders through a stable dividend, while considering the continuously renewed demand for oil and gas as a given.

Mariana Liakopoulou is a research analyst focusing on natural gas security and geopolitics of the European and Eurasian energy markets. She serves as Research Fellow in Energy Security with the NATO Association of Canada (Toronto, Ontario, Canada). She is also Editor-in-Chief of the Palgrave Macmillan Studies in Energy Transitions Series (London, U.K.), in charge of the publication of "The Palgrave Handbook of Zero Carbon Energy Systems and Energy Transitions." She has been assigned consultancies with the Energy Community (Vienna, Austria) and has been included in the roster of experts of the Secretariat. Formerly, she was a non-resident Research Fellow in Energy Security and Geopolitics with Caspian Policy Center (Washington D.C.) and a member of the Strategy and Communication Team of the European Union Agency for the Cooperation of Energy Regulators (Ljubljana, Slovenia). Her publication record comprises works for an array of industry sources, including the International Association for Energy Economics, the United States Association for Energy Economics, Natural Gas World, Gulf Intelligence and European Gas Hub.

Brad Handler is the Founder and Principal of Energy Transitions Research, LLC and a Senior Fellow at the Payne Institute for Public Policy at the Colorado School of Mines. This follows a 20-year career on Wall Street as an Equity Research Analyst covering the Oilfield Services & Drilling (OFS) sector at different investment banks including Jefferies and Credit Suisse. Brad is researching the Oil & Gas industry's role and vulnerability in the global transition to lower carbon energy as well as financial tools to spur private investment in the decarbonization of energy.

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Topic: Standardization in support of the energy infrastructures and clean energy transition

  • Katerina Poustourli

June 3, 2021

Europe attaches great importance to the highest standards of nuclear safety, not only within its territory but also beyond. It advances the global safety agenda through bilateral and multilateral cooperation with countries outside the EU and through close cooperation with relevant international organizations.

Climate change mitigation is a potential driver for maintaining and expanding the use of nuclear power. According to the International Energy Agency, the use of nuclear power has avoided more than 60 gigatonnes of Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions over the past 50 years. The nuclear industry contributes to European Union energy objectives, such as: achieving a viable and diverse energy mix; limiting Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions; maintaining security of energy supply and energy independence; promoting economic development and employment.

Standardization can play a role in meeting these targets by promoting best practices, helping the market uptake of renewable energies and new technologies, improving energy efficiency, safety, security and providing tools to optimize installations and systems. Standardization is boosting partnerships between European and International organizations, between different actors and technology platforms that leading towards highly successful developments of joint research activities and unique research infrastructures networks.

Is there a better way to protect our planet than to harness the collaborative, inclusive and consensus culture of making standards by multiple partners worldwide in order to deliver a safe, secure and peaceful world to next generations? Who wouldn't want to be part of such an effort!

Dr. Katerina Poustourli is a Scientific/Technical Officer of the International Hellenic University. She is a senior scientist and researcher who dealt with quality, safety and security dimensions throughout the length of her career-path, in labs, in operational and production systems. After working as supervisor engineer, quality manager, consultant, ISO MSS lead auditor, adjunct professor, vocational trainer and project manager in many sectors for twenty-two years in Greece and as Scientific/Technical Officer and Policy/Project Officer of the European Commission for four years on R&I security domains, obtained a holistic point of view in her leadership approaches and excellent communication skills. By taking part in multicultural, interdisciplinary working groups and committees, her qualities on building capacities and synergies among different actors and stakeholders, have been enhanced. She has led a number of projects for both public and private organizations addressed efficiency, technical competence and continuous improvement in Greece (e.g., Energy Inspectors for Buildings Seminars, Energy Management Systems courses etc.). As standardization expert and advisor, she has been involved in EU Research & Innovation projects dealing with critical infrastructures protection, disaster risk reduction, CBRNe threats and cybersecurity. She has authored numerous papers have been presented in international, European and national conferences. The current period, she particularly focuses on Energy safety & security standardization taking into account the perspectives of business continuity, circular economy and cyber security.

Dr. Katerina Poustourli received her PhD in Quality/Robust Engineering in 2011 from National Technical University of Athens, and both her integrated MSc and Bachelor in Production & Management Engineering from Technical University of Crete in 1992. She also gained a Postgraduate Diploma in Design Thinking and Innovation by Emeritus MIT in 2020.

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Topic: How To Avoid Climate Disaster: The Economics Behind Bill Gates' Book

  • Tilak K. Doshi

May 20, 2021

This talk is about Bill Gates new book on "How To Avoid Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need". While the book is for a general audience, it is important to critically assess the implicit economic assumptions utilized in the analysis and policy recommendations presented by the author.

Dr. Tilak K. Doshi is Senior Visiting Fellow, Middle East Institute, NUS. Dr. Doshi is an industry expert with over 25 years of international work experience in leading oil and gas companies and think tanks.

His previous appointments include Chief Economist, Energy Studies Institute, National University of Singapore; Senior Fellow and Program Director, King Abdullah Petroleum Studies and Research Center (KAPSARC, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia); Executive Director for Energy, Dubai Multi Commodities Centre (DMCC, UAE); Specialist Consultant, Saudi Aramco (Dhahran, Saudi Arabia); Chief Asia Economist, Unocal Corporation (Singapore); Director for Economic and Industry Analysis, Atlantic Richfield Corporation (ARCO, Los Angeles, U.S.).

Dr. Doshi is the author of many articles and three books on energy economics, the most recent of which was “Singapore Chronicles: Energy” (Straits Times Press, 2016). He received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Hawaii on a scholarship provided by the East-West Centre. He was one of two candidates which were granted the 1984 Robert S. McNamara Research Fellow award by World Bank, Washington, D.C., and he received a Distinction for MA in Economics by Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand in 1982.

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Topic: Better Customer Service Opens Up New Opportunities for Gas Utilities

  • Walid Elgazzar

May 6, 2021

Gas utilities are not famous for providing great customer service; did you ever consider your gas utility's Google reviews? However, cultivating trusting and engaged customer relations can help gas utilities as they prepare to face coming challenges including defection from the natural gas grid, hydrogen integration and cyber threats.

Walid Elgazzar is a consultant with a focus on energy security and sustainability. He completed numerous projects for public organizations, corporations and startups. Prior to that, Walid held engineering and project management roles in the oil and gas infrastructure business. He holds degrees in mechanical engineering and economics, and he is currently pursuing a Master of Engineering in Infrastructure Protection and International Security at Carleton University.

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Topic: Decarbonizing the Heating and Cooling Sector

  • Pablo Benalcazar

April 23, 2021

The deep decarbonization of the heating and cooling sector is one of the world's most imminent challenges. It is a complex and diverse undertaking that will have a profound economic and social impact. It will have a major effect on households and energy-intensive processing industries. Therefore, it is clear that to address this problem, a combination of various policy instruments and technologies will be required. This podcast discusses the recent challenges and future needs related to the decarbonization of the heating and cooling sector. Moreover, it explores the role that national and local governments will play in supporting the successful transition of this sector.

Dr. Pablo Benalcazar is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Energy Economics at the Mineral and Energy Economy Research Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences (MEERI PAS). His research interest focuses on the design, operation, and modeling of combined heat and power systems integrated with energy storage technologies. He holds an M.Sc. and a Ph.D. from the AGH University of Science and Technology. He is a member of the Polish Association for Energy Economics (PAEE) and served as Student Representative in the Council of the IAEE (2019-2020).

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Topic: Preserving Electric Power System Stability with Evolving Generation: The Mexico Case

  • Pablo Marcelo Mulas del Pozo

April 2, 2021

With a strong dependency on power production based on natural gas, most of it imported, Mexico has no official plans for new nuclear power units. On the basis of the energy trilemma and medium-term electricity system projections, a preliminary analysis is made to describe how unforeseen events can deviate the programmed infrastructure from having the electricity system end up in an optimum sustainable state.

Pablo Mulás is the Executive Director of the World Energy Council Mexican committee. His research activities have been in the energy field. He has held academic and management positions in the three main Mexican public universities, in the Mexican nuclear research and electric research establishments, in the latter as President. He is a fellow of the Mexican Academy of Engineering and a member of the Mexican Academy of Science. For the last twenty years, he has been with the World Energy Council in different positions. He was honored with a doctorate "honoris causa" by Salford University of the UK and received the W. Bennett Lewis Award of the American Nuclear Society.

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Topic: What can the U.S. shale oil and gas boom teach economists about labor markets?

  • Gregory B. Upton Jr.

March 25, 2021

Over the past decade, the advent of oil and natural gas production from shale geological formations has fundamentally changed not only global energy markets but also the communities that reside above these formations. This podcast discusses how economists might gain insights from this natural experiment about labor markets and business cycles more broadly.

Discussion is motivated by three working papers that can be found here, here and here.

Greg Upton is Associate Professor-Research at Louisiana State University’s Center for Energy Studies.

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Topic: Social Equity as a Crucial Component of the Energy Transition

  • Julia Snodgrass

March 11, 2021

In the transition to a low-carbon, climate resilient society, there are some crucial social equity and distributional implications that must be addressed. In this podcast, Julia Snodgrass, a Dartmouth College senior, outlines a report she produced for the UN Economic Commission for Europe's Sustainable Energy Division. Applying an intersectional, political ecology framework to two transition case studies, she is able to identify oversights and strengths in policy design and implementation-lessons that can inform decarbonization strategies moving forward.

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Topic: New Directions in Electricity for ASEAN's Economy post COVID-19

  • Kwanruetai Boonyasana

February 24, 2021

The COVID-19 pandemic generated a worldwide health crisis in 2020 causing an unprecedented global upheaval creating shock waves throughout health systems, economies, and societies spreading to every continent except Antarctica. This situation raises the important question of the short- and long-term implications of such a pandemic for political and economic cooperation in the power sector. In terms of electricity demand, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) confronts a dilemma familiar to many emerging economies: energy use remains low relative to the global average, but the area is one of the fastest-growing regions in the world. This podcast discusses the new directions in electricity for ASEAN's post COVID-19 economy, focusing on energy demand and supply, national and cross-border electricity trade, and including power generation technology.

Kwanruetai Boonyasana is a lecturer and researcher in Thailand. Her major research fields are energy, financial and educational economics, while she is also interested in doing research in international trade involving ASEAN. In 2008, she was offered a scholarship from Rajamangala University of Technology Phra Nakhon (RMUTP) to study at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom, and completed her Ph.D. in Economics in 2013. While there, she received the best presentation award from the "Postgraduate Research Festival" in 2011, and "OFID/IAEE Support Fund" from the International Association for Energy Economics (IAEE) for international conferences in Canada (2009), Sweden (2010), Australia (2012) and the United States (2011 and 2013). She returned to Thailand to take a position as lecturer at RMUTP in Bangkok, and was granted the distinguished award for 2016 by the National Research Council of Thailand for her Ph.D. thesis "World Electricity Co-operation". In addition, she received "The Best Researcher" award from RMUTP in 2017, and "The Best Practice: Excellence in Research Teaching" award from nine Universities of Rajamangala University of Technology (Thailand) in 2019.

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Topic: Decarbonizing an energy company

  • Jacqueline Boucher

February 16, 2021

Deploying a carbon neutrality approach inside an energy company is a whole journey which addresses the upstream, downstream and internal functioning of the business. This podcast relates this journey and highlights the large coordination effort necessary to put all pieces together in order to reach a greenhouse gases trajectory in line with what science based targets in this field.

Jacqueline Boucher has a Ph D in Operations Research and a specialized Ms in Economics. She started her career in European research programs in the energy field at the University of Louvain (BE). She worked afterwards as an independent consultant on missions for the World Bank, the European Commission and for major gas and electricity companies.

She set up the Quantitative Analysis department of Electrabel before becoming SVP Strategy and Chief Risk Officer. She further joined GDF SUEZ in Paris as SVP Economic Modeling and Studies, a center of expertise dedicated to strategic studies, analyses of markets, economics of investment files and risk management tools.

In 2016, she became Chief Power Asset Manager at Engie Global Energy Management, in charge of the hedging and optimization of the power assets, the related vanilla, intraday, exotic short and long term power trading operations and the physical equilibrium of the Engie power assets portfolio in Central West Europe.

Since fall 2019, she has been coordinating the deployment of the Engie carbon neutrality project in the Benelux Business Unit of Engie.

She has been directors in several quoted companies (Elia, Fluxys), acts as director in some Engie affiliated companies and Vice President Business & Government Affairs for the International Association of Energy Economics (IAEE).

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Topic: Liberalization 2.0: Electricity Regulation "Behind the Meter". EVs, prosumers, and RES

  • Atanas Georgiev

February 4, 2021

This podcast is about some of the new challenges, related to the latest technologic advancements in the energy sector. It is about prosumers, distributed generation, renewables, and electric vehicles and how these developments pose new challenges for the energy regulatory authorities.

The decentralization of the electricity grid will lead to the spurring of new business models. They will require new set of regulatory knowledge, skills, and instruments - so that the incentives in the market will be right and that the interests of all stakeholders are well balanced.

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Atanas Georgiev is Dean of the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski" (FEBA, SU). He is also Head of Department "Industrial Economics and Management" and Director of the master's program "Energy Markets and Services" at FEBA. Publisher and Chief Editor of the business media "Utilities" and "Facilities". He is a frequent guest lecturer at the Bulgarian Diplomatic Institute and author of many energy-related publications.

Atanas defended a Ph.D. dissertation on the institutional independence of energy regulatory authorities and has Master's Degrees in "Energy Economics" and "Finance and Banking" from FEBA, SU. He attended specializations at the US State Department (IVLP "Global Energy Security"); "Generation Next" at Rossotrudnichestvo; courses at the Public Utility Research Center (Florida, USA) and the Florence School of Regulation, Azerbaijan Diplomatic Academy, etc.

Atanas is a member of the IAEE and a board member at national associations: National Committee of Bulgaria for the World Energy Council and the Electric Mobility Industrial Cluster. He has been an active consultant in the energy sector since 2005 - at Uconomics Ltd. and at Public Services Ltd.

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Topic: The electric vehicle transition and the importance of understanding consumer behaviour

  • Marcello Contestabile

January 21, 2021

Driven by strong government incentives, over the last few years the market for electric vehicles has truly taken off; yet the electric vehicle transition is still in its early phases and substantial obstacles lay ahead. Electric vehicles are a consumer product and therefore consumer acceptance is particularly critical, however the complex factors behind it are not yet well understood by the governments that seek to promote their adoption and the automotive industry that manufactures them. This podcast reviews key insights from the study of leading electric vehicle markets and discusses their policy implications.

Marcello Contestabile is Principal Economist at the Qatar Environment & Energy Research Institute (QEERI) and leads the Institute's techno-economic and policy research activities since February 2019. He is also a Visiting Fellow at the Imperial College Centre for Energy Policy and Technology (ICEPT). Marcello holds a PhD in Energy Policy and Technology and MSc in Environmental Technology, both from Imperial College London. Over the last 15 years he has conducted extensive techno-economic and policy analysis of low-emission road transport technology, particularly battery electric and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, and related infrastructure. Marcello has held positions in research organisations in Europe and the Middle East, in consultancy, industry and government.

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Topic: Energy and Health Care Parallels: Maximizing Electric Utility Social Welfare

  • Douglas B. Reynolds

January 14, 2021

This pod cast, based on a paper from the 4th IAEE Eurasian Conference in Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan, is about electric power markets. It considers consumer sovereignty in U.S. health care markets and then looks at the parallels between those health care markets and electric power markets. It then shows how one particular U.S. health care market mechanism called the Advantage Medicare System works best. It then explains how an Electric Power CEO bonus system, based on the Advantage System, can create better, more socially maximizing outcomes for electric power markets than the current consumer sovereignty based systems the world is using now.

Professor Douglas B. Reynolds, Ph.D. is a professor of petroleum and energy economics at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. He has lived, worked and studied in many countries, and has studied and worked on energy economic models for Alaska for over two decades. He lived in the former Soviet Union just after the fall. He has published multiple articles, books and book chapters and has an academic Google Hirsch Index of 16.

Contact Douglas B. Reynolds

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Topic: China and the World Oil Market

  • Raymond Li

January 7, 2021

The take-off of China's economy has often been associated with the rising oil price before the oil price crash in 2014. This podcast reviews China's activities and involvement in the world oil market in recent decades. It also presents new empirical results on the influence of Chinese oil imports on the oil price.

Raymond Li is assistant professor of economics at the University of Canberra, Australia. His main research interests include market integration, energy pricing and energy consumption analysis. Before moving to Canberra, Ray held a faculty position at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He has also taught courses on energy economics at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and Hong Kong Baptist University.

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Topic: Distribution network tariffs in an increasingly distributed, decentralised, and decarbonised power system: Australian and UK perspectives

  • Alan Rai, Duncan Sinclair, and Scott Sandles

December 28, 2020

This podcast discusses recent developments in the design of distribution network tariffs in South Australia, the state with one of the highest take up rates of distributed energy resources (chiefly, rooftop PV), globally. The South Australian experience is compared and contrasted with the experience in the UK, where there is also high DER adoption, in the form of electric vehicles.

In the context of a projected acceleration in DER take-up in Australia and the UK, the speakers note the need for distribution networks to continue to evolve to enable both the efficient integration of DER and to maximise the value to the overall power system from increased DER take up.

Alan Rai (Main Speaker):

Alan is a Director in Baringa Partners’ Australian office, where he leads their investment advisory area, consulting for private- and public-sector debt and equity investors. Alan has worked in a diverse range of areas, including: policy and regulation, business case analysis, asset valuation, transaction advisory and market due diligence, cutting across all asset classes including large-scale thermal, renewables, interconnectors, and pumped and battery storage. He has worked with the whole spectrum of energy clients, including: government, regulators, system operators, utilities, project developers, investment and infrastructure funds, lenders, network businesses and industry bodies.

Duncan Sinclair:

Duncan Sinclair is a leading expert in energy market design and regulation, and has over 25 years of experience in the global power and utilities sector.

Over the past decade he has advised Government, regulators and system operators on decarbonisation policy and integrating renewables into electricity systems.

Duncan has advised a number of clients on the commercial and regulatory issues surrounding decentralised energy and smart grids, covering active network management of distributed generation, distribution connected electricity storage and demand side response.  He is advising network companies on potential changes to business and operating models associated with the transition to more active Distribution System Operation, in the UK, US and Australia.  He is also working with developers of offshore grid projects on commercial and regulatory models.

Scott Sandles:

Scott is a Senior Manager in Baringa Partners’ Australian office, where he leads the energy networks advisory area. Scott has extensive experience in energy network policy and regulation including: network access and tariff reform, incentive scheme design, expenditure assessments, cost of capital, revenue and asset base modelling, service classification and revenue/price control mechanism design. Prior to joining Baringa Partners earlier this year, Scott was the Director of Network Tariff Reform at the Australian Energy Regulator. Scott also worked at Ofgem where he led several workstreams of Ofgem’s Future Charging and Access reforms.

Contact Alan Rai, Duncan Sinclair, and Scott Sandles


Topic: Regulatory Policy Considerations for Cost Effective Investment in Electric Vehicle Charging Infrastructure in the US

  • Joe Cavicchi

November 25, 2020

"Regulatory Policy Considerations for Cost Effective Investment in Electric Vehicle Charging Infrastructure in the US" discusses regulatory measures that can complement the development of convenient and predictable access to EV charging. Issues addressed include the benefits of providing up-front incentives to incentivize consumers to buy EVs and the value of flexible regulatory frameworks that allow for a mix of public and private investment. Mr. Cavicchi discusses the evolving role of public financial support for EVSE and EV charging stations and a number of considerations that arise when policymakers and regulators evaluate the various approaches that may be adopted to support EV charger accessibility. Mr. Cavicchi concludes that government interventions be calibrated to avoid adversely affecting the development of a competitive market for EV charging infrastructure.

Joe Cavicchi is an expert on the economics of wholesale and retail electricity markets. With more than 20 years of consulting experience, he advises a wide range of clients on issues associated with wholesale power market design and market power mitigation frameworks, wholesale and retail contracting practices, and regulatory and contract disputes arising in these marketplaces. In these engagements Mr. Cavicchi has conducted economic analyses evaluating the impact of regulatory policies on electricity markets, applied rigorous analytical modeling tools to power system operations, evaluated the effectiveness of market power mitigation frameworks in conjunction with antitrust analyses, and led economic investigations of market participant bidding behavior associated with allegations of market manipulation. Mr. Cavicchi has extensive experience as an expert witness before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and other federal and state regulatory authorities. He presents and publishes frequently on issues relevant to electricity market design and evolution. He is a registered professional mechanical engineer in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts

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Topic: Where can drivers charge their electric vehicle for free in the US?

  • Nicolas Astier and Marie Louise Arlt

November 19, 2020

How electric vehicles (EV) pay for charging can play an important role in facilitating the integration of EVs into the power system. This podcast explores the current pricing practices of charging stations in the United States. Quite surprisingly, many stations are supposedly offering free charging, suggesting that hosting facilities derive additional benefits from attracting EV drivers. We also find indications that the share of free stations might decrease with higher EV adoption.

Marie Louise Arlt is a PhD student in Economics at the University of Freiburg, Germany, and a Visiting Scientist at Stanford University and SLAC. She studies economic approaches to integrate flexible loads in electricity markets with high shares of renewable energy, including electric vehicles.

Nicolas Astier is a postdoctoral fellow within the Bits & Watts Initiative at the Stanford Precourt Institute for Energy. His research focuses on the on-going fundamental changes in the electricity industry, such as electric mobility and the increasing adoption of distributed energy resources.

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Topic: Energy Security in the XXI Century

  • Honorata Nyga-Lukaszewska

October 22, 2020

In this podcast Honorata Nyga-Lukaszewska describes energy security in the XXI century. The talk delivers the phenomenon's evolution since 1970s and 1980s and provides insights on COVID-19 influence on oil and gas markets. Additionally, podcast uses an example of Poland to present energy security concerns in the Central and Eastern Europe.

Honorata Nyga-Lukaszewska, PhD is assistant professor at the Warsaw School of Economics, Poland. Her main research interests centre around international economics, energy security and international energy markets. Author and reviewer of numerous articles, book chapters and book on energy security. Graduate of the IEA training on "Energy security and international energy markets". Alumnae of the US State Department International Visitors Leadership Programme dedicated to "US Energy security and foreign policy". Active in teaching assignments.

Contact Honorata Nyga-Lukaszewska

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Topic: EVs Will Never Prevail Over ICEs

  • Mamdouh G Salameh

November 5, 2020

Mamdouh Salameh argues that electric vehicles (EVs) are going to face an uphill battle against internal combustion engines (ICEs). And while they are bound to get a share of the global transport system, they will never prevail over ICEs. EVs' share of the market could only decelerate slightly the demand for oil. As a result, ICEs will continue to be the dominant means of transport throughout the 21st century and far beyond.

Mamdouh G. Salameh is an international oil economist. He is also a visiting professor of energy economics at the ESCP Europe Business School in London. Dr Salameh holds a PhD in Economics specializing in the economics & geopolitics of oil and energy. He has authored four books on oil.

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Free Podcast

Topic: Rural electrification, energy access and economic development: What is the evidence and how does it affect policy?

  • Mike Toman and Jörg Peters

October 29, 2020

Donor agencies and governments in the Global South are investing billions into extending the electricity grid to rural areas. Mike Toman and Jörg Peters discuss the latest evidence on the social and economic impacts these investments have. Furthermore, they ponder the political economy behind preferences of governments for building infrastructure over providing decentralized technologies like off-grid solar and improved cookstoves. 

Further readings:

https://voxdev.org/topic/energy-environment/do-improved-cooking-stoves-inevitably-go-smoke-evidence-india-and-senegal
https://blogs.worldbank.org/developmenttalk/rural-electrification-how-much-does-sub-saharan-africa-need-grid

Jörg Peters heads the research group “Climate Change in Developing Countries” at RWI – Leibniz Institute for Economic Research in Germany. His research focuses on the evaluation of infrastructure programs as well as decentralized energy. Moreover, Jörg is engaged in the research transparency debate. His research findings have been published in leading journals, including the Journal of Health EconomicsNature Energy, and the World Bank Economic Review.

Michael A. Toman (Mike) is a lead economist in the World Bank Development Research Group and manager of the sustainability and infrastructure research team. His current research interests include energy supply and economic development, and climate change mitigation. Prior to joining the World Bank in 2008, Mike held senior analytical and management positions at RAND Corporation, Inter-American Development Bank, and Resources for the Future. He also served as a Senior Staff Economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers from 1994-1996.

Contact Jörg Peters and Michael A. Toman

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Topic: Who wants to ride the Swedish nuclear rollercoaster?

  • Thomas Tangerås

October 22, 2020

Sweden is one of the countries in the world that is most reliant on nuclear power. Despite this dependence, nuclear power has been surrounded by political controversy almost from the very beginning. This podcast documents the history of nuclear power in Sweden, in particular the abrupt policy reversals that on every occasion have overturned the conditions for nuclear power investment. It ends with an outlook on the future of nuclear power in Sweden.

Thomas Tangerås is associate professor of economics. He directs the "Sustainable Energy Transition" research program at the Research Institute of Industrial Economics (IFN) in Stockholm. His research focuses on market power in electricity markets, regulation of network industries and energy policy.

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Topic: Energy Price Jumps, Fat Tails and Climate Policy

  • Charles Mason

October 15, 2020

Many authors who have analyzed key energy commodities such as crude oil and natural gas have found that prices of these commodities exhibit either time-varying volatility or rapid, unexpected changes - also known as jumps. Either of these phenomena lead to "fat tails," the feature that large percentage changes occur far more often that would be predicted by a conventional model (for example, that assumed percentage changes were normally distributed). In this podcast I discuss the evidence supporting the presence of fat tails for key energy-relatedcommodities, and then discuss the implications for investment in costly projects that will be difficult, if not impossible, to reverse. A central theme in this analysis is that the presence of jumps or fat tails increases the premium associated with delaying investment, often referred to as the "option value of waiting." The presence of jumps increases the option value of waiting, thereby delaying investments; this takes on particular significance when the investments in question are intended to combat climate change.

See the related USAEE working paper at: USAEE Working Paper No. 20-463

Charles Mason is the H. A. "Dave" True, Jr. Chair in Petroleum and Natural Gas Economics in the Department of Economics and Associate Dean in the College of Business at the University of Wyoming. His research is mainly focused on energy / resource economics. He has served in a variety of editorial roles over the past few decades, including: editor of the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management; associate editor of the European Economic Review; co-editor of Economic Inquiry; joint editor-in-chief of Strategic Behavior and the Environment. He is a faculty fellow at Resources for the Future. He was a visiting academic at Cambridge, Oxford and the London School of Economics in the UK; the Venice International University in Italy; and the Toulouse School of Economics in France. He testified in the case brought by the US Department of Justice against BP related to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

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Topic: Sustainable Electricity Market Design - Challenges, Existing Contributions and a Novel Approach

  • Gerald Blumberg, Christoph Weber, and Aiko Schinke-Nendza

October 8, 2020

In this podcast, Gerald Blumberg, Christoph Weber and Aiko Schinke-Nendza discuss challenges and existing contributions to an improved sustainable electricity market design. Decarbonization and distributed energy resources are discussed as key drivers and the challenges for coordination in these times of digitization are highlighted. Specifically, a novel two-layer market design is proposed which contributes to solving some of the identified challenges.

Latest publication (will be published after the EEM 2020): Schinke-Nendza, A; Blumberg, G; Weber, C: "A Novel Design for Electricity Markets based on the Cellular Approach", EEM 2020

Gerald Blumberg works since 2016 as research associate and since 2019 as head of the research group "Renewable Energy and Networks" at the House of Energy Markets and Finance at the University Duisburg-Essen. He studied Business Administration and Electrical Energy Engineering at the Universities of Aachen and Trondheim. Besides long-term energy scenarios and regionalization his research interests lie in the electricity market design and the regulatory framework of the energy system. Furthermore, congestion management, ancillary service procurement and the market integration of distribution grid participants are fields of his interests.

Prof. Dr. Christoph Weber holds since 2004 the Chair for Management Science and Energy Economics at the University Duisburg-Essen. He studied mechanical engineering at the University of Stuttgart and took a doctoral degree in economics at the University Hohenheim in 1999. Within his habilitation in 2004 and other research he focused on methods for decision support in energy economics by consideration of relevant uncertainties. His group with more than 20 researchers is part of the House of Energy Markets and Finance and is conducting research on a wide range of energy industry issues. His research interests include market design for sustainable electricity markets, decisions under uncertainty, modelling of uncertainties in renewable and other energy systems and models of electricity, balancing power, heat and gas markets.

Aiko Schinke-Nendza studied industrial engineering and management at the University of Duisburg-Essen. Since February 2019 he is working as a research associate at the House of Energy Markets and Finance in the research group "Renewable Energies and Networks". His research interests include the development and modelling of market designs of future energy systems (with a focus on the interaction of market and grid, considering the effect of local incentives) and the forecasting of congestions in electricity grids based with renewable infeed. As project manager of the research project ZellNetz2050 he majorly contributed to the novel two-layer market design which is (also) presented within this podcast.

Contact Gerald Blumberg, Christoph Weber, and Aiko Schinke-Nendza

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Topic: The development of China's green finance

  • Lin Zhang

October 1, 2020

China has officially started the development of green finance since 2012 when the term ecological civilization was enshrined in the Chinese Communist Party Constitution. The process is more top-down in nature, with the importance of climate mitigation and low-carbon development being highlighted. Over the past years, China has built an innovative and competitive market for green finance, with solid financial system and market mechanisms. This helps its way towards green development and sustainability, provides experience-sharing and assistance to countries along the Belt and Road Initiative, and contributes to the global climate change mitigation.

Dr. Lin Zhang is an assistant professor in the School of Energy and Environment at the City University of Hong Kong, with a joint appointment in the Department of Public Policy. Before moving to Hong Kong in 2016, he was a researcher associated with Centre of Economic Research at ETH Zurich. Zhang's research aims to develop improved quantitative modelling approaches for the design, evaluation, and upgrade of sustainable energy policies at local, regional, and global levels. Dr. Zhang holds a PhD in economics from ETH Zurich, double bachelor degrees from Peking University.

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Topic: What is "fair" for electricity pricing in this renewable energy era?

  • Mohammad Ansarin

September 24, 2020

There's some controversy about pricing electricity, especially where there's small-scale solar generation. Persistent are misunderstandings about tariff fairness in debates between utilities, regulators, consumers, and solar energy advocates. What we need most are objective evaluations of a tariff's pros and cons and viewing electricity more as a private good.

Mohammad Ansarin is a PhD candidate at the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University (Netherlands). He currently analyzes the wealth transfer and economic efficiency effects of metering and tariff design in high-renewables distribution grids. Previously, Mohammad worked on agent-based modeling of the electricity grid. In a previous life, Mohammad obtained two engineering degrees, one BSc from Sharif University of Technology (Iran) and another MSc from Koc University (Turkey).

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Social Acceptance of Wind Energy: Evidence from Cross-Country Surveys

  • Anna (Ebers) Broughel

September 17, 2020

This podcast is dedicated to the matters of public acceptance and investor acceptance of wind energy technologies in Europe and the US. The talk provides insights on best project development practices, ranging from utilization of immersive virtual reality technology for project visualizations to describing community's preferences with respect to wind project characteristics. The talk touches upon willingness-to-invest into community finance in different countries, as well as the role of the third-party project developers in the energy transition.

Anna (Ebers) Broughel is an energy economist and statistician at Tetra Tech, with a decade of experience in energy project management and data analysis. Prior to joining Tetra Tech, Dr. Ebers worked as a technical project manager at the Solar Energy Technologies Office of the U.S. Department of Energy. During 4 years of her post-doctoral training, she researched permitting barriers to large energy projects, working collaboratively with co-authors from Sweden, Austria, Germany, and other countries, and presented to a wide range of audiences at both academic and industry conferences.

She holds an MA from the University of Konstanz, Germany, and a PhD in economics and policy from the State University of New York in association with Syracuse University, where she was a Fulbright scholar. After completing her post-doctoral work at the University of St.Gallen, Switzerland, she gained further professional experience as a researcher and lecturer at the University of Maryland, College Park. Currently, she serves as a council member for the U.S. Association for Energy Economics and a non-resident fellow at the University of Texas at Austin.

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Topic: Interdisciplinary studies for the Energy Transition

  • Marina Bertolini

Sept 14, 2020

The Energy Transition environment is dense of aspects to be investigated and highly uncertain; Only through a systematic interdisciplinary dialogue and joint modelling we will reach useful results in research; These results are necessary to provide the correct policy indications to exploit projects that will lead to new energy markets.

Marina Bertolini is a post-doc research fellow at the Department of Economics and Management at the University of Padova (Italy). She also works for the Interuniversity Research Centre on Public Economics (CRIEP) on energy-related issues. Her research interests mainly regards energy markets, investment evaluation in the energy field, utilities regulation and public-private partnerships. She also works on European funds in the energy field. In 2019, she founded the academic spin-off Economit that is currently under her direction.

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Topic: Energy Transition, Distributed Energy Resources, and the Need for Information

  • Burcin Unel

August 30, 2020

Proliferation of distributed energy resources spurred discussions about how to reforms today's utility regulation. However, these discussions overlook the role information plays in designing optimal policies for distributed energy resources. This podcast discusses how information, or lack thereof, can affect the cost-effectiveness of the transition to a clean and distributed energy future. It then outlines how new modeling tools that can take into account information asymmetries can help policymakers design better policies.

Dr. Burcin Unel is the Energy Policy Director at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law. She leads Policy Integrity's stakeholder involvement both at the federal and state level in front of regulatory agencies such as public utility commissions and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. She is an expert in utility regulation, and environmental and energy policy, and has authored numerous papers, policy briefs, public comments, and reports to improve the quality of governmental decisionmaking in those areas. Her articles on designing energy policy for the future of the grid have been selected by the Environmental Law Institute as one of the top five environmental law articles of the year three times in a row, from 2017 to 2019. Before joining Policy Integrity, she held faculty positions at the Department of Pharmaceutical Outcomes and Policy at the University of Florida, and the Department of Economics at Bogaziçi University in Turkey.

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Topic: Rewarding a group of customers for energy production and consumption after feed-in programs

  • Yoshihiro Yamamoto

August 24, 2020

Customer-owned devices such as photovoltaic systems and energy storage systems will contribute to decarbonization, affordable energy provision, and so on. At the same time, however, they might disturb the management of the power system, causing an imbalance between energy supply and demand. This podcast proposes a reward system to incentivize small-scale customer-owners to operate their devices in a harmonized way.

Yoshihiro Yamamoto is a professor at the Takasaki City University of Economics, Japan. His research interest is the economic analysis of renewable energy with regard to investment, trade, and organization. Today, he particularly focuses on policy design for renewables to be well integrated into the power system. He holds a PhD in energy science from Kyoto University.

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Topic: Energy Transition in Latin America: No one can serve two masters

  • Dr. Carlos Silva

August 19, 2020

Facing the challenges of the energy transition in a region with social inequalities

People in Latin America are concerned about how climate change affects the local effects of pollution, but the region also has some very real and urgent concerns of inequality and poverty. How can the region serve two masters? Can public policy promote green technologies while keeping its priority in supporting the poor? Can a country spend a significant amount of public resources supporting renewable energies or decarbonization? Can it be justified to spend money that could be allocated to serve public schools or to provide better health services to the underprivileged?

Professor Silva received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering in 2000 from University of Minnesota - Twin Cities, and both his MSc in Electrical Engineering and his Bachelor in Industrial Engineering from Universidad Católica de Chile in 1996 and 1994, respectively.

Dr. Silva is an associate professor at the Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez in Santiago, Chile. He is also a researcher at the Solar Energy Research Center (SERC).

Dr. Silva has led a number of projects for both the government and private companies addressing energy efficiency, renewable energies, power system economics and markets, and public policy design on energy sustainability, in the United States and Chile.

Contact Dr. Carlos Silva

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Topic: The Trans European Network-Energy (TEN-E) Regulation and the European Green Deal

  • Dr. Tooraj Jamasb

August 13, 2020

The recently adopted European Green Deal aim to achieve decarbonisation of the EU energy sector and economy. This requires a revision of the focus of the Trans European Network-Energy (TEN-E) Regulation for the development of the European energy sector. This podcast revisits the features and experience of the TEN-E Regulation so far. It then outlines a set of recommendations to be considered in the forthcoming revision of the TEN-E.

Tooraj Jamasb is the director of Copenhagen School of Energy Infrastructure (CSEI) and Endowed Professor of Energy Economics at the Department of Economics, Copenhagen Business School (CBS). He has previously held the post as Professor of Energy Economics at Durham University and prior to that as SIRE Chair in Energy Economics, Heriot-Watt University and Senior Research Associate, University of Cambridge, where he obtained his PhD. He is a Research Associate at Energy Policy Research Group (University of Cambridge); Centre for Energy and Environmental Policy Research (Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT); and the Oviedo Efficiency Group (University of Oviedo). He is a member of the academic advisory panel of the UK energy regulator Ofgem.

He is co-editor of the interdisciplinary books "The Future of Electricity Demand: Customers, Citizens and Loads, 2011"; "Delivering a Low-Carbon Electricity System, 2008"; and "Future Electricity Technologies and Systems, 2006"; all published by Cambridge University Press. He is an Associate Editor of the journals Energy Strategy Reviews and Sustainability. Prof. Jamasb has participated in projects for the Council of European Energy Regulators, several European and international government and energy regulators, energy companies, and The World Bank. With his numerous international peer-reviewed publications in leading energy journals and a number of international research projects.

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Topic: Effectiveness and Balance: a Canadian Regulator's Approach to Energy Efficiency Programs

  • Jackie Ashley

August 7, 2020

Energy efficiency programs encourage customers to be more efficient in their use of energy. However, they also require a source of funding and it can be difficult to explain to decision makers why utilities should fund programs that encourage customers to use less (rather than more) of their product. This podcast addresses this issue by presenting a 'plain English' explanation of how energy efficiency programs, funded by a utility, can be both cost-effective and equitable.

Jackie Ashley brings over twenty years' experience in the regulation of the energy sector to the British Columbia Utilities Commission (BCUC). Prior to joining the BCUC, Jackie gained extensive regulatory and rate design experience at BC Hydro, and then moved to the New Zealand Electricity Authority where she worked on market development. At the BCUC, Jackie's focus is on improving the efficiency of both the supply side and the demand side of the electricity and gas market, with key areas of focus being long-term resource planning, energy efficiency, rate design and distributed generation.

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Topic: It's Not All About the Money: Switching Energy Suppliers

  • Catherine Waddams and David Deller

August 5, 2020

Low switching rates in residential energy markets have puzzled many policymakers and academics. In this podcast Catherine Waddams and David Deller discuss their analysis of over 7,000 consumers' decisions in a collective energy auction in Britain. Greater savings were positively associated with switching, but the effect of increasing them leveled off above about £100 a year. Although energy itself may be a homogeneous product, consumers exhibit non-price preferences between suppliers. Also, uncertainty and time pressures, as well as household structure and level of education all affected whether or not respondents accepted the auction's offer of savings. The findings explain why policymakers cannot rely on the presence of cheaper deals in the energy market to guarantee widespread switching to cheaper energy providers.

David Deller is a Senior Research Associate at the Centre for Competition Policy (CCP) at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom. He supports senior academics in producing applied research relating to regulated industries and competition policy. Core tasks include the analysis of survey datasets in STATA and co-ordinating the Centre for Competition Policy's responses to official consultations and tenders. Prior to joining CCP, David was awarded a PhD in Economics and worked as a Temporary Lecturer at the University of Essex in Colchester.

Catherine Waddams (formerly Price) is a member of the Centre for Competition Policy (CCP) and Emeritus Professor in Norwich Business School, which she joined in 2000. She was director of CCP until July 2011. From 1995 to 2000 she was founding Director of the Centre for Management under Regulation and Professor in Warwick Business School, and prior to that senior lecturer in economics at the University of Leicester. She has held visiting positions at the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Copenhagen and the University of Cambridge.

Contact Catherine Waddams and David Deller


Topic: Sustainable Energy Options for Electricity Generation in Bangladesh

  • Dr. Sakib Bin Amin

August 2, 2020

As an emerging economy, Bangladesh is considered a 'role model' of socio-economic development among the South Asian countries. Despite all adversities, the country has achieved sustainable economic growth over 7% in the last decade. Bangladesh government's vision is to become an upper-middle-income country by 2021, and a high-income country by 2041. Providing electricity to a broad population segment at an affordable price would be a prerequisite to sustain targeted economic growth levels and the desired levels and spread of social development. Therefore, the Bangladesh government aims to create a well-balanced power generation environment by considering its future energy mix in light of affordability, sustainability, environment, and social aspects.

Dr. Sakib Bin Amin is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics, and the Director of the Accreditation Project Team (APT) at North South University, Bangladesh. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Durham University (UK). Dr. Amin was also the receiver of the Commonwealth Rutherford Fellowship (2017-2018) for conducting his postdoctoral research in Energy Economics at Durham University (UK). He is the first Bangladeshi modeller to develop an energy focused DSGE (Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium) model in relevance to the Bangladesh energy sector. Bangladesh Energy Regulatory Commission (BERC) underpinned the results of his model in increasing the price of retail electricity by 5.3% on a weighted average in 2017.His research mainly focuses on electricity price reform, and energy policy in the developing Countries. Dr. Sakib Amin would be delighted to hear from colleagues, students and others interested in energy related issues in developing countries and can be contacted at sakib.amin@northsouth.edu

For further information, please visit: http://sakibamin.com/

Contact Dr. Sakib Bin Amin

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Free Podcast

Topic: Markets for congestion management - current debate in Europe and open research questions

  • Anna Pechan & Marius Buchmann

July 26, 2020

The EU Commission requires network operators to establish markets for network services to integrated distributed generators and especially flexible loads into these processes. In this podcast Anna and Marius give you some insights into their experience with such markets from different research projects. We briefly touch upon the current debate about market-based redispatch in Germany and afterwards focus on three challenges with respect to incentive regulation and TSO/DSO-Coordination that come with the introduction of congestion management markets and discuss potential solutions.

Anna Pechan and Marius Buchmann are both PostDocs at Jacobs University Bremen at the chair for Energy Economics where they investigate regulatory and market design issues related to the energy transition in Europe.

Contact Anna Pechan & Marius Buchmann

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Topic: Emissions trading in a net zero world - what will be traded?

  • Prof. Dr. Regina Betz
  • Interview conducted by Raphaela Kotsch (PhD Student at ZHAW and University of Zurich)

July 21, 2020

The Paris agreement states in Art. 4 that "a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases" is to be achieved by the mid of the century. Many countries have introduced emissions trading schemes in order to meet their commitments under the Paris agreement. But how may an emissions trading system be designed in a net zero world? This podcast will provide some food for thought.

Prof. Dr. Regina Betz is Head of the Center for Energy and the Environment (CEE) at the School of Management and Law of the Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW). Before joining ZHAW she was Joint Director at the Centre for Energy and Environmental Markets (CEEM) at the UNSW Sydney. Regina's teaching and research interests include energy and climate economics. She also contributes to master courses and consults to industry and government clients in these areas in Europe and Australia. She has been called to appear as an expert witness in climate change issues at various Federal government enquiries. Today her research is mainly focusing on the design of climate policies such as emissions trading schemes or energy efficiency obligations as well as electricity markets applying experimental economics or empirical methods.

Contact Regina Betz

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Rooftop PV and electricity distributors: who wins and who loses?

  • Bruce Mountain

July 9, 2020

Rooftop solar is growing rapidly in Australia. The question of whether households with rooftop solar are being subsidised by other customers, and the impact of rooftop solar on network charges is getting attention. We have examined this in Victoria, Australia and conclude that rooftop solar's network impacts are small, and swamped by wholesale market price effects.

Bruce is the inaugural Director of the Victoria Energy Policy Centre. He is a well-known Australian energy economist whose research and advisory work has focussed on the economic regulation of network monopolies, the analysis of retail energy markets, and the design of emission reduction and renewable energy policies. Bruce has been a long-standing advisor to governments, regulators, market participants and interest groups in Australia and internationally. His PhD from Victoria University was on the political economy of energy regulation in Australia, and he has a Bachelor's and a Master's degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Cape Town and qualified as a Chartered Management Accountant in England.

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Canada's COVID-19 Economic Response Plan: Supporting the Clean-up of Orphan and Inactive Oil and Gas Wells

  • Aaron Annable

July 8, 2020

As part of its response to support Canadians and businesses facing hardship as a result of the global COVID-19 pandemic, the Government of Canada announced C$1.72 billion to fund the clean-up of orphan and inactive oil & gas wells in Alberta, Saskatchewan and British Columbia, the three provinces where the large majority of these wells are located. The funding is being distributed to these provinces, all of which have launched programs to receive applications from interested landowners and oilfield service companies. These programs, which will generate energy sector employment while cleaning up the environment at the same time, have the potential to create thousands of jobs and lead to the reclamation of tens of thousands of wells.

Aaron Annable began his assignment as Energy Counsellor at the Embassy of Canada in Washington, D.C., in September 2016. Prior to this, he was a Senior Advisor for energy and environmental issues in the North America Bureau at Global Affairs Canada in Ottawa. In 2014-15, he served for 10 months as Acting Consul General of Canada to New England, based in Boston, before which he was Head of Foreign Policy and Diplomacy at the Consulate General in Boston for four years, where he managed Canada's political, energy and public affairs files and public in the region. He has previously held several positions within Global Affairs Canada, where he worked on numerous Canada-U.S. energy and trade policy files. Prior to joining the Department in 2003, he worked for both the Privy Council Office and Service Canada. He graduated from McGill University with a degree in Political Science (International Relations) and is from Montreal, Quebec.

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Free Podcast

Global Hydrogen Prospects: Synergies with Gas and LNG

  • Roberto F. Aguilera

June 30, 2020

Hydrogen is expected to play a role in a low carbon energy future, but it remains to be seen if the universe's most abundant elemant will be able to gain significant market share in the energy mix. This presentation provides an overview, examining the opportunities and constraints in the coming decades, with a focus on synergies between hydrogen and the natural gas and LNG industries.

This content was originally presented at the RIU Good Oil Conference. We thank RIU Conferences for their permission to share this content.

Roberto F. Aguilera is an Energy Economist with Curtin University Oil and Gas Innovation Centre, Australia. He was a Distinguished Lecturer of the Society of Petroleum Engineers in 2018-2019, on the subject of oil prices, which took him to 30 cities worldwide. From 2013-2017, he was an analyst with the OPEC Secretariat, Vienna, where he co-authored their annual World Oil Outlook. He Holds PhD and Master degrees from Colorado School of Mines, USA, and a Bachelor degree from Haskayne School of Business, University of Calgary. His publication record comprises The Price of Oil, a book published by Cambridge University Press in English and Chinese.

Contact Roberto F. Aguilera

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Nuclear in the Recovery Plan in Europe

  • Claude Fischer Herzog

June 15, 2020

Claude was a school teacher and graduate of the Sorbonne Doctoral School of Political Science. She created Confrontations Europe with Philippe Herzog and Michel Rocard in 1991 where she was general secretary then president. She heads ASCPE, a studies and training company which organizes "Les Entretiens Européens" and "Les Entretiens Eurafricains".

She leads reflection and action for the Energy Union and seminars for the societal appropriation of nuclear power in Europe, and a seminar "Europe 21" with Philippe Herzog on the identity of Europe and the need to re-found the European Union.

Contact Claude Fischer Herzog

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Is Australian policy support for Time-Of-Use tariffs doing more harm than good?

  • Kelly Burns

June 9, 2020

The move towards variable electricity generation has seen a resurgence in the popularity of Time-Of-Use (TOU) tariffs with Australian regulators, policy makers, electricity distributors and retailers. Dr Kelly Burns reviews recent empirical evidence into the effectiveness of TOU tariffs to encourage Victorian households to shift load from high price peak periods to low price off-peak periods and critically analyses the policy support for these tariff structures. While TOU tariffs as a pricing option for households to consciously opt-in could offer benefits for some households, encouraging (or even forcing) the take up TOU tariffs will fail to achieve the policy objective of load shifting and may do more harm than good, particularly for poorer households.

Kelly Burns is a Senior Research Fellow at the Victoria Energy Policy Centre at Victoria University. She has an extensive background in economics, law and finance across and the public and private sectors including Australian Bureau of Statistics, Colonial First State, Department of Premier and Cabinet (Vic) and Department of Justice (Vic). Kelly holds a PhD in Economics from RMIT, L.L.B (hons) and B.Eco (hons) from LaTrobe University, and Graduate Certificate in Financial Planning from FINSIA. Her primary specialisation is in the application of econometric modelling and forecasting in the field of energy economics.

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The Outlook for Energy and Carbon Markets in China

  • Philip Andrews-Speed

June 3, 2020

China's government has launched a number of initiatives to increase the role of market forces in the energy sector: in the oil, gas and electricity industries, and through the development of carbon markets. However, the wider political and economic context is undermining these moves. Central and local government agencies interfere in the operation of these markets. At the same time, most resources and assets remain in the hands of enterprises owned by the state at central or local levels. As a result, the new market mechanisms will not yield their potential efficiency improvements and emissions reductions. The government's responses to COVID-19 does not appear to improve this outlook.

Dr Philip Andrews-Speed is a Senior Principal Fellow at the Energy Studies Institute, National University of Singapore. He has nearly 40 years in the field of energy and resources, starting his career as a mineral and oil exploration geologist before moving into the field of energy and resource governance. His main research interest has been the political economy of the low-carbon energy transition. China has been a particular focus for his research, but in recent years he has been more deeply engaged with energy challenges in Southeast Asia. His latest book China as a Global Clean Energy Champion: Lifting the Veil (with Sufang Zhang) appeared early in 2019.

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Climate-friendly recovery package: We cannot waste the crisis!

  • Claudia Kemfert

June 1, 2020

In view of the dramatic Covid19 crisis, do we really have to put all climate protection measures on ice now, as is now being called for in isolated cases but loudly? No, the opposite is the case, two crises can be resolved at once if the rescue packages are future-oriented and focus on climate protection and sustainability. Prof. Kemfert reports on studies that have examined specific economic recovery packages for a socio-ecological transformation in Germany.

Prof. Dr. Claudia Kemfert is Professor of Energy Economics and Sustainability and Head of the department Energy, Transportation, Environment at the German Institute of Economic Research (DIW Berlin) since April 2004. She is a member of the German Advisory Council on the Environment.

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COVID-19 and the Shaping of Our Energy Future

  • Akin Iwayemi

May 16, 2020

Arguably, our energy future will no longer be business as usual given the way COVID-19 Pandemic has severely impacted our globalized world. Indeed, the short run health, economic, social and psychological impact of the disease has been unprecedent since the end of the Second World War. An important task for us as key stakeholders in the energy sector and the economy in general is to provide insight as how to play the new energy game that is already unfolding before our very eyes across the globe efficiently. The main objective of this podcast is to explore some of the key issues associated with the new energy normal, partly highlighted by the recent negative price for May deliveries of West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil. The current disequilibrium in global energy markets is a signal that the post-COVID-19 new energy normal would be characterized by a more uncertain future. To a certain extent, COVID-19 Pandemic has and will reshape of our energy future

Akin Iwayemi got Ph.D. degree in Economics, from the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA, in 1975. He was a Professor of Economics at the Department of Economics, University of Ibadan until he retired in 2011. Akin Iwayemi is currently associated with and serves as Principal Investigator at the Centre for Petroleum Energy Economics and Law (CPEEL), at the University of Ibadan, an institution he helped to establish with the financial support of Macarthur Foundation. He is widely published in international and national journals, monographs and books. Furthermore, he was the inaugural President of the Nigerian Association for Energy Economics, an affiliate of the International Association for Energy Economics, between 2007 and 2011. Professor Iwayemi was a former Council member of the International Association for Energy Economics. He is a Fellow of both the Nigerian Economic Society and the Nigerian Association for Energy Economics.

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Universal energy access: critical thoughts on the development of on-grid solutions and mini-grids in Africa

  • Raul Bajo

May 4, 2020

Back in 2000, around 1.7 billion people lived without electricity; about one third of them were located in Sub-Saharan Africa. Spurred by the Sustainable Development Goal #7 (which aims at ensuring universal access to electricity by 2030) governments deployed billions of dollars to expand grid coverage. However, as of 2018, around 602 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa still lack an electricity connection in their homes, and more than 700 million people there are projected to require it by 2040. Why does this happen? How can we close this gap between the supply of electric infrastructure and the demand for electricity connections? What are the most effective policies that increase the number of "electrified" households? Join me in this talk, in which I share with you some recent research that addresses these questions with a focus on Africa.

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Oil prices in negative territory? In power markets frequent negative prices could become the norm

  • Cristian Stet

April 24, 2020

This podcast draws a parallel between the recent negative prices in the oil and power markets. Additionally, the podcast shows that while negative oil prices are rare events, in power markets, without policy changes or technology developments, those negative prices could become more frequent.

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The European integration of the energy spot markets

  • Clara Balardy

April 20, 2020

This podcast explains the mechanism of the power spot markets in Europe, particularly the day-ahead and the intraday markets. It also describes how those markets are interconnected thanks to the multi-regional market coupling initiative. Today, 95% of EU consumption is coupled.

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Emergency: The Citizen's Guide to Climate Success

  • Mark Jaccard

April 16, 2020

In this talk, Mark Jaccard speaks on how climate-concerned citizens can overcome myths that hinder us from acting in time to prevent extreme climate impacts. Their actions can involve personal consumption choices (electric vehicles, heat pumps) but these only have an effect if citizens are also engaged in the political process and civil society to elect and support climate-sincere politicians. These personal and collective efforts must align with and foster a global strategy of decarbonization, especially in developing countries. Listen to find out what is required on a simple path to climate success and what you can contribute.

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COVID19 is changing the emission trajectories in China and at global level.

  • Lin Zhang

April 4, 2020

The outbreak of coronavirus and its associated quarantine policy have lowered China's carbon emissions by over 184 million tons per month. Such reduction is expected to persist in the long run through structural change of energy mix and the digitalization of its economy. We shall work together and turn the current health crisis into an opportunity for mitigating climate change.

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Energy security at the worldwide level

  • Carlo Andrea Bollino

February 17, 2020

This work emphasizes the importance of extending the notion of energy security, beyond the mere physical supply concerns to include market considerations, in a new world of increasing connectivity of regional fuel markets and rapid deployment of renewables.

In the market framework, these developments call for an energy security assessment framework that will capture the trade-offs between the supply security and price affordability components, associated risks and potential vulnerabilities, as well as the specifics of individual economies.

We use the concept of efficient portfolio frontiers, characterized by a return and a variance of the portfolio composition. The return is constructed for oil import growth and the variance is measured across the oil import portfolio for major oil importers.

Alike, the return is constructed for oil export growth and the variance is measured across the oil export portfolio for major oil exporters.

The idea is to assess and compare the energy security status and priorities of individual economies and to provide a risk and policy simulation tool.

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Free Podcast

Assessing US and Global Energy Security, Today and In the Transition

  • Mark Finley

January 24, 2020

We are undergoing a historic energy transition. This includes a surge in shale production in the United States, growing reliance on natural gas, and a dramatic increase in the use of renewables. What does security mean in this brave new world of energy? And what framework should we use to assess national and global vulnerabilities? Long-time IAEE member Mark Finley discusses these topics with Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy.

This material may be quoted or reproduced without prior permission, provided appropriate credit is given to the author and Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy.

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The Challenges of Energy Transition

  • Boyko Nitzov

December 12, 2019

The podcast offers remarks on some key features and challenges which may define the future of energy on a global scale. Energy is seen as a factor of production that contributes to growth and successfully substitutes for labor and land, but is expected to undergo a profound transformation. Is it realistic to expect that such a transformation is possible on a scale of unprecedented magnitude and at a neck-breaking pace, both never experienced before, and then at a reasonable cost? Are there going to be leaders and laggards, thus creating fragmentation between markets and regions in the world? The podcast does not strive to provide answers to all questions, but invites further discourse on the topic - hopefully to help find more answers.

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Economics aspects of Energy Systems Integration

  • Tooraj Jamasb

October 28, 2019

The concept of Energy Systems Integration (ESI) as a strategy to achieve future sustainable energy sectors is increasingly attracting attention. There remain technological challenges and solutions to be found. However, less attention has been given to the economic, regulatory, research and development, and policy frameworks that will be needed for efficient operation of the integrated systems. This podcast sheds light on some of these challenges that need to be addressed along the technical solutions.

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Carbon Pricing

  • Govinda R. Timilsina

October 18, 2019

The author of this podcast is Dr. Govinda Timilsina. Dr. Timilsina is a Senior Economist, Research Department, World Bank, Washington, DC. He has been working in the field of energy economics and climate policy over the last 25 years. In this podcast, Dr. Timilsina discusses various issues related to carbon pricing instruments investigated in the academic literature. He also briefly introduces carbon pricing schemes implemented in practice around the world.

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What Next for European Energy Policy? Suggestions for the New Commission

  • Michael Pollitt

October 1, 2019

The incoming European Commission runs from 2019 to 2024 and will lead in the setting of European energy policy. Drawing on a white paper co-authored with colleagues from the Centre on Regulation in Europe (CERRE) in Brussels I outline suggestions for focus areas of work in energy policy for the new Commission. I begin by reviewing progress to date with the European single electricity and gas markets and with the EU's 2020 energy and climate targets. Then I outline our policy suggestions in the areas of markets, networks and institutions.

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European Coal Phase-out and Resulting Effects on Affected Regions and the Global Coal Market

  • Pao-Yu Oei

September 19, 2019

This podcast describes the ongoing trend of coal phase-out within OECD countries and in particular Europe. The replacement of coal by renewables hereby faces several challenges beyond energy security issues such as employment or identification with coal as former backbone of many economies. The recent decisions by the German 'coal commission', however, prove that compromises between all stakeholders are possible. It is therefore important to identify and address every region´s individual challenges to manage this upcoming transition in a just and timely manner to meet international agreed-on climate targets.

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Variable Energy Resources and the Electricity System: issues and challenges

  • Anna Creti

September 15, 2019

The podcast hughlights the challenges that variable energy resources pose when they are integrated into distribution and transmission networks, as well as in day-ahead markets. The specificies of integration costs and market effects are explained, together with issues arising in the path toward electricity market decarbonization.

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Electric vehicles: solution or new problem?

  • Amela Ajanovic

February 1, 2019

Electric vehicles are considered an important means in coping with increasing environmental problems in the transport sector. Many governments worldwide have set targets to increase the number of electric vehicles, although their environmental benignity is not ensured in the scope of the policies implemented. In this podcast, the overall environmental impact of electric vehicles is discussed based on a life cycle assessment of electric vehicles. To make electric vehicles more environmental friendly it is essential to increase the use of renewable energy sources in electricity generation.

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Shining a Light on Solar Energy.

  • Peter Schwarz

December 3, 2018

The effects of solar energy on the cost of producing electricity are complex, running the gamut from fear about a utility death spiral as customers abandon the utility in favor of solar, leaving non-solar customers and the utility with stranded capital costs, to a blessing that lowers cost by providing an inexhaustible and low-cost energy source and a savior in slowing the emission of greenhouse gases. In turn, there is the enigma of how to compensate consumers who are now "prosumers." The widespread approach of net metering, where the customer meter runs backwards for every unit of solar electricity produced and sold to the utility, has the virtue of simplicity, but the liability that it does not reflect the value of solar. Utilities are in the early stages of evaluating alternative rates that may include time-dependent components, capacity charges, and higher fixed charges.

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Local Energy, Global Markets: A Global Vision is Needed to Make Energy More Accessible

  • Pierre-Olivier Pineau

August 8, 2018

From oil wells to the best wind power plant sites, energy production is eminently local. Some locations are just better suited than others to produce energy. Energy needs, however, follow human activities and are global. Most markets are now global, information is travelling at the speed of light, but energy does not always follow

In this podcast, I present different forms of local energy challenges and discuss global energy market solutions. In a third part, I illustrate the gains from a global approach in the North American North East electricity markets - where ambitious decarbonization goals are set, but where only local planning, so far, is taking place.

These issues, and many more, will be treated in much more depth at the 2019 International IAEE conference in Montreal, May 29 to June 1, 2019. I hope to see you there! Start by visiting our conference website: http://iaee2019.org/

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Some reflections on oil and the stock markets.

  • David Broadstock

June 7, 2018

David presents some reflections on the topic of oil prices, in particular oil price shocks, and the impacts they have to company stock prices. Once certain philosophies and modeling characteristics are permitted, especially the idea that the relationship between oil prices and stock market outcomes may vary continuously through time, it is possible to obtain new insights. Of particular interest, is the underlying conclusion that stock prices embed oil price related risk somewhere between 10-20% of the time on average, and therefore that the impact of oil prices and oil price shocks to stock market outcomes is more sporadic or intermittent than may have been implied by much previous work in this area.

Research for this report was done with George Filis.

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The 2013-2014 Oil and Gas Reform in Mexico: What has been done so far?

  • Alejandra Elizondo Cordero

In 2013, the Mexican Constitution was amended to foster competition in the energy sector. The private sector was allowed to get involved in energy production, distribution and commercialization. Changes in all energy markets are underway. Even if is still soon to measure the Mexican Oil and Gas Reform success, the current prospects are encouraging.

In the oil and gas upstream sector we witnessed the first round of tendering processes. Thirty-nine new companies have been awarded contracts, both onshore and offshore. Nevertheless, the main impact in the short term is in the market of geological information.

In the oil and gas downstream sector, the economic regulator was strengthened in order to deal with natural monopolies. Mexico is set to achieve energy security, with quality standards and at competitive prices. For example, the gasoline market, with prices previously managed by the government is moving towards liberalization gradually by defining ceiling prices and regionalizing them. Gasoline stations, for example, have been given the freedom to compete. By 2018, gasoline prices are going to be set by the market.

Finally, in the oil and gas midstream sector, transport costs are still above efficient levels, and a high potential for pipeline development is guiding investment plans, both for natural gas and all liquid fuels. Vertical integration in natural gas has been dismantled, promoting new entrants to the shipping industry and investments in transportation infrastructure in strategic of socially beneficial pipeline and storage projects. New rules that guarantee open access to transportation for all oil and gas products have been put in place, but are still to be enforced.

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Why is a Cap and Trade System Performing so Well?

  • Georg Erdmann

I would like to use this opportunity to discuss the different consequences of CO2 taxes and CO2 cap and trade. Many people claim that the European emission trade system is a failure, due to CO2 prices below 10 Euro/t CO2. But the cap and trade system seems to achieve the goal for whit it is designed, namely to reduce European greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent until 2020 and by 40 percent until 2030, compared to 1990. A deeper analysis shows that low CO2 prices are equivalent with achieving the emission target while only the failure of this target would correspond to high CO2 prices. So environmental politicians an choose between high revenues from CO2 tax or the successful achievcement of ambitious reduction targets. Both together is infeasible. It was in Buenos Aires where I proposed this concept already at an IAEE plenary, but in the mean time the data are more convincing in confirming this conclusion.

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Energy use and emissions in transport: Are reductions possible?

  • Gunnar Eskeland

Globally, transport is about a quarter of energy use, and a higher share of fossil fuel use. Here, I use transport as a window to what we have learned lately on reducing emissions of greenhouse gas emissions. One theme is speed, size and slenderness: apart from new technologies and energy carriers, vehicles and vessels that are larger, fuller, glide slowly and more smoothly save on energy and emissions. Another theme is flexible policy instruments, such as emission taxes, which leave challenges and flexibility to households and firms. We illustrate with maritime shipping for cargo and with cars for people. Transport will respond with emission reductions in many ways - it is way too pessimistic to think we must reduce transport to reduce emissions.

Research for this report was done with Lisa Assmann, H. E. Lindstad and Shiyu Yan.

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The 41st IAEE International Conference

  • Machiel Mulder

Machiel Mulder will talk about the theme of the 41st IAEE International Conference. This theme is Transforming Energy Markets. Machiel is president of the Benelux Association for Energy Economics (BAEE). The BAEE will be the host of this conference, which will be held in Groningen, the Netherlands from 10-13 June 1018. In his talk, Machiel concludes that the current European market of green certificates does not stimulate investments in renewable energy. The system needs to be redesigned to let it have a real mpact on investments.

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Natural Gas Pricing

  • Ron Ripple

Professor Ripple discusses the growth of natural gas in a global context, and he questions the relevance of the repeated comparisons between potential natural gas pricing mechanisms and that for crude oil. He sees this as a faulty comparison and suggests that there may be closer linkage of natural gas prices around the globe than observed for crude oil.

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