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'Increasing energy-efficiency is important because it offers the prospect of partly solving our climate change and energy security problems without pain. This book sheds further light on the issue, focusing on energy-extensive economic activities which, by sheer volume, collectively use a substantial amount of energy. That simple fact alone makes this book worthwhile, but there are many other gems.' Richard Tol, the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI), Ireland This innovative book explores the adoption of energy-saving technologies and their impact on energy efficiency improvements. It contains a mix of theoretical and empirical contributions, and combines and compares economic and physical indicators to monitor and analyse trends in energy efficiency. The authors pay considerable attention to empirical research on the determinants of energy-saving investment including uncertainty, energy-price volatility and subsidies. They also discuss the role of energy modelling in policy design and the potential effect of energy policies on technology diffusion in energy-extensive sectors. Written from a multi-disciplinary perspective, this book will appeal to academics and graduates in the areas of energy-saving technologies, energy economics and natural resource economics, as well as policy-makers particularly those in energy policy.
Is there a chance that public or private research and development institutions can improve the efficiency of the R&D process? This book gives a positive answer by designing an integrated concept of the science technology cycle and the innovation system of each technology. The position of a new technology in the sciencetechnology cycle is identified by several indicators from patent analysis, citations and market information data. The innovation system supports the search for a comprehensive understanding of all important stakeholders of an innovation, possible obstacles and related policies. The application of the methodology leads to convincing results: the hype of the PEM fuel cell activities could have been identified at the end of the 1990s as the phase of euphoria, but not as a situation close to market entry in the car or boiler markets.
Much is written in the popular literature about the current pace of technological change. But do we have enough scientific knowledge about the sources and management of innovation to properly inform policymaking in technology dependent domains such as energy and the environment? While it is agreed that technological change does not 'fall from heaven like autumn leaves,' the theory, data, and models are deficient. The specific mechanisms that govern the rate and direction of inventive activity, the drivers and scope for incremental improvements that occur during technology diffusion, and the spillover effects that cross-fertilize technological innovations remain poorly understood. In a work that will interest serious readers of history, policy, and economics, the editors and their distinguished contributors offer a unique, single volume overview of the theoretical and empirical work on technological change. Beginning with a survey of existing research, they provide analysis and case studies in contexts such as medicine, agriculture, and power generation, paying particular attention to what technological change means for efficiency, productivity, and reduced environmental impacts. The book includes a historical analysis of technological change, an examination of the overall direction of technological change, and general theories about the sources of change. The contributors empirically test hypotheses of induced innovation and theories of institutional innovation. They propose ways to model induced technological change and evaluate its impact, and they consider issues such as uncertainty in technology returns, technology crossover effects, and clustering. A copublication o Resources for the Future (RFF) and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA).
The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.tandfebooks.com/doi/view/10.4324/9781351127264, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. Meeting the goals enshrined in the Paris Agreement and limiting global temperature increases to less than 2°C above pre-industrial levels demands rapid reductions in global carbon dioxide emissions. Reducing energy demand has a central role in achieving this goal, but existing policy initiatives have been largely incremental in terms of the technological and behavioural changes they encourage. Against this background, this book develops a sociotechnical approach to the challenge of reducing energy demand and illustrates this with a number of empirical case studies from the United Kingdom. In doing so, it explores the emergence, diffusion and impact of low-energy innovations, including electric vehicles and smart meters. The book has the dual aim of improving the academic understanding of sociotechnical transitions and energy demand and providing practical recommendations for public policy. Combining an impressive range of contributions from key thinkers in the field, this book will be of great interest to energy students, scholars and decision-makers.
Deregulation shaping the Electricity industry across the world is a systems challenge cutting across interdisciplinary fields of technology, economics, public policy, environment and sociology. Decision makers that shape tomorrow's policy and investors that invest in financial and technological developments in this industry need to rely on multiple decision models to make informed decisions. This thesis serves to provide one such decision model among many that could be used to understand the key dynamics shaping a highly complex industry. We employ "top-down" and "bottom-up" approaches to build system dynamics model in an attempt to distinguish between adoption and diffusion phenomenon, as a result benefiting from hybrid modeling techniques that combine structures from both models. The models are evaluated with wide range of scenarios to arrive at policy guidance and business model recommendations. The dynamic hypothesis arising from our system dynamics model points to declining marginal profits in a saturating market coupled with proliferation of competitors, over-estimation of demand and diminishing margins for Curtailment Service Providers (CSPs) in the long run. We propose recommendations to surmount these challenges. To tap the smaller commercial and residential markets, CSPs must extend its reach by partnering with composite channel partners, who in the long run could also play a vital role in demand generation. In the face of commoditization and disruptive innovations, CSPs would not be able to sustain their margins just by aggregating demand response (DR) capacity, they would need to reinvent themselves to become energy management firms providing integrated, automated turnkey energy services including energy efficiency services, risk management, planning, sourcing along with providing DR services. Taking a systems approach in evaluating demand-side technology, we further investigate environmental implications of DR by characterizing the carbon savings from DR. Our analyses revealed that the carbon savings from DR triggered load curtailment when calculated using system wide carbon intensities differ substantially from those calculated with locational carbon intensities. Locational carbon intensity captures the location and time-specific dynamics of electricity demand. We, therefore, recommend it is a better metric for evaluating total carbon savings from load curtailment, which could be used to devise carbon abatement policies and structure the electricity market design rules. Furthermore, adding a carbon price to the marginal cost equation could change the dispatch order of plants and thus align carbon abatement policies with load reduction schemes.
Is there a chance that public or private research and development institutions can improve the efficiency of the R&D process? This book gives a positive answer by designing an integrated concept of the science technology cycle and the innovation system of each technology. The position of a new technology in the sciencetechnology cycle is identified by several indicators from patent analysis, citations and market information data. The innovation system supports the search for a comprehensive understanding of all important stakeholders of an innovation, possible obstacles and related policies. The application of the methodology leads to convincing results: the hype of the PEM fuel cell activities could have been identified at the end of the 1990s as the phase of euphoria, but not as a situation close to market entry in the car or boiler markets.