IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/gam/jeners/v5y2012i10p4165-4185d20904.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Short Term Electric Production Technology Switching Under Carbon Cap and Trade

Author

Listed:
  • Timothy Considine

    (Department of Economics and Finance, University of Wyoming, 1000 University Ave, Laramie, WY 82072, USA)

  • Donald F. Larson

    (The Development Research Group, World Bank, 1818 H St., N.W., Washington, DC 20433, USA)

Abstract

This study examines fuel switching in electricity production following the introduction of the European Union’s Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) for greenhouse gas emissions. A short-run restricted cost equation is estimated with carbon permits, high-carbon fuels, and low carbon fuels as variable inputs. Shadow values and substitution elasticities for carbon-free energy resources from nuclear, hydroelectric and renewable sources are imputed from the cost equation. The empirical analysis examines 12 European countries using monthly data on fuel use, prices, and electricity generation during the first phase of the European Emissions Trading System. Despite low emission permit prices, this study finds statistically significant substitution between fossil fuels and carbon free sources of energy for electric power production. Significant substitution between fossil fuels and nuclear energy also was found. Still, while 18 of the 20 substitution elasticities are statistically significant, they are all less than unity, consistent with limited substitution. Overall, these results suggest that prices for carbon emission permits relative to prices for carbon and carbon free sources of energy do matter but that electric power producers have limited operational flexibility in the short-run to satisfy greenhouse gas emission limits.

Suggested Citation

  • Timothy Considine & Donald F. Larson, 2012. "Short Term Electric Production Technology Switching Under Carbon Cap and Trade," Energies, MDPI, vol. 5(10), pages 1-21, October.
    • Handle: RePEc:gam:jeners:v:5:y:2012:i:10:p:4165-4185:d:20904
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/5/10/4165/pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/5/10/4165/
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Butler, Lucy & Neuhoff, Karsten, 2008. "Comparison of feed-in tariff, quota and auction mechanisms to support wind power development," Renewable Energy, Elsevier, vol. 33(8), pages 1854-1867.
    2. Ellerman,A. Denny & Buchner,Barbara K. & Carraro,Carlo (ed.), 2007. "Allocation in the European Emissions Trading Scheme," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9780521875684.
    3. Nicolosi, Marco, 2010. "Wind power integration and power system flexibility-An empirical analysis of extreme events in Germany under the new negative price regime," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 38(11), pages 7257-7268, November.
    4. Halvorsen, Robert & Smith, Tim R, 1986. "Substitution Possibilities for Unpriced Natural Resources: Restricted Cost Functions for the Canadian Metal Mining Industry," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 68(3), pages 398-405, August.
    5. Bird, Lori & Bolinger, Mark & Gagliano, Troy & Wiser, Ryan & Brown, Matthew & Parsons, Brian, 2005. "Policies and market factors driving wind power development in the United States," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 33(11), pages 1397-1407, July.
    6. Considine, Timothy J. & Larson, Donald F., 2006. "The environment as a factor of production," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 52(3), pages 645-662, November.
    7. Thomas G. Cowing & V. Kerry Smith, 1978. "The Estimation of a Production Technology: A Survey of Econometric Analyses of Steam-Electric Generation," Land Economics, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 54(2), pages 156-186.
    8. Atkinson, Scott E & Halvorsen, Robert, 1976. "Interfuel Substitution in Steam Electric Power Generation," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 84(5), pages 959-978, October.
    9. Hoffmann, Volker H., 2007. "EU ETS and Investment Decisions:: The Case of the German Electricity Industry," European Management Journal, Elsevier, vol. 25(6), pages 464-474, December.
    10. Larson, Donald F. & Ambrosi, Philippe & Dinar, Ariel & Rahman, Shaikh Mahfuzur & Entler, Rebecca, 2008. "A Review of Carbon Market Policies and Research," International Review of Environmental and Resource Economics, now publishers, vol. 2(3), pages 177-236, November.
    11. Caves, Douglas W & Christensen, Laurits R, 1980. "Global Properties of Flexible Functional Forms," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 70(3), pages 422-432, June.
    12. Morrison, Catherine J, 1988. "Quasi-Fixed Inputs in U.S. and Japanese Manufacturing: A Generalized Leontief Restricted Cost Function Approach," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 70(2), pages 275-287, May.
    13. Rie Watanabe & Guy Robinson, 2005. "The European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS)," Climate Policy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 5(1), pages 10-14, January.
    14. Christensen, Laurits R & Greene, William H, 1976. "Economies of Scale in U.S. Electric Power Generation," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 84(4), pages 655-676, August.
    15. Hobbs, Benjamin F., 1995. "Optimization methods for electric utility resource planning," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 83(1), pages 1-20, May.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Zhen, J.L. & Huang, G.H. & Li, W. & Liu, Z.P. & Wu, C.B., 2017. "An inexact optimization model for regional electric system steady operation management considering integrated renewable resources," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 135(C), pages 195-209.
    2. Spierdijk, Laura & Shaffer, Sherrill & Considine, Tim, 2017. "How do banks adjust to changing input prices? A dynamic analysis of U.S. commercial banks before and after the crisis," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 85(C), pages 1-14.
    3. Ye Duan & Zenglin Han & Hailin Mu & Jun Yang & Yonghua Li, 2019. "Research on the Impact of Various Emission Reduction Policies on China’s Iron and Steel Industry Production and Economic Level under the Carbon Trading Mechanism," Energies, MDPI, vol. 12(9), pages 1-26, April.
    4. Ping Che & Yanyan Zhang & Jin Lang, 2019. "Emission-Intensity-Based Carbon Tax and Its Impact on Generation Self-Scheduling," Energies, MDPI, vol. 12(5), pages 1-17, February.
    5. Wei Wei & Yile Liang & Feng Liu & Shengwei Mei & Fang Tian, 2014. "Taxing Strategies for Carbon Emissions: A Bilevel Optimization Approach," Energies, MDPI, vol. 7(4), pages 1-18, April.
    6. Larson, Donald F., 2013. "Blue water and the consequences of alternative food security policies in the Middle East and North Africa for water security," Policy Research Working Paper Series 6464, The World Bank.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Considine , Timothy J. & Larson, Donald F., 2009. "Substitution and technological change under carbon cap and trade : lessons from Europe," Policy Research Working Paper Series 4957, The World Bank.
    2. Considine, Timothy J. & Larson, Donald F., 2006. "The environment as a factor of production," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 52(3), pages 645-662, November.
    3. Pettersson, Fredrik & Söderholm, Patrik & Lundmark, Robert, 2012. "Fuel switching and climate and energy policies in the European power generation sector: A generalized Leontief model," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 34(4), pages 1064-1073.
    4. Lee, Myunghun & Jin, Yingmei, 2012. "The substitutability of nuclear capital for thermal capital and the shadow price in the Korean electric power industry," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 51(C), pages 834-841.
    5. Supawat Rungsuriyawiboon, 2004. "An Analysis of Cost Structures in the Electricity Generation Industry," CEPA Working Papers Series WP052004, School of Economics, University of Queensland, Australia.
    6. Woo, C.K. & Liu, Y. & Zarnikau, J. & Shiu, A. & Luo, X. & Kahrl, F., 2018. "Price elasticities of retail energy demands in the United States: New evidence from a panel of monthly data for 2001–2016," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 222(C), pages 460-474.
    7. Kaldellis, John K. & Zafirakis, D., 2011. "The wind energy (r)evolution: A short review of a long history," Renewable Energy, Elsevier, vol. 36(7), pages 1887-1901.
    8. Romano, Antonio A. & Scandurra, Giuseppe & Carfora, Alfonso & Fodor, Mate, 2017. "Renewable investments: The impact of green policies in developing and developed countries," Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Elsevier, vol. 68(P1), pages 738-747.
    9. Lichter, Andreas & Peichl, Andreas & Siegloch, Sebastian, 2015. "The own-wage elasticity of labor demand: A meta-regression analysis," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 80(C), pages 94-119.
    10. Stefan Seifert, 2016. "Semi-Parametric Measures of Scale Characteristics of German Natural Gas-Fired Electricity Generation," Discussion Papers of DIW Berlin 1571, DIW Berlin, German Institute for Economic Research.
    11. Zhang, Pan, 2019. "Do energy intensity targets matter for wind energy development? Identifying their heterogeneous effects in Chinese provinces with different wind resources," Renewable Energy, Elsevier, vol. 139(C), pages 968-975.
    12. Polzin, Friedemann & Egli, Florian & Steffen, Bjarne & Schmidt, Tobias S., 2019. "How do policies mobilize private finance for renewable energy?—A systematic review with an investor perspective," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 236(C), pages 1249-1268.
    13. Dale W. Jorgenson, 1991. "Productivity and Economic Growth," NBER Chapters, in: Fifty Years of Economic Measurement: The Jubilee of the Conference on Research in Income and Wealth, pages 19-118, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    14. Michael Maloney, 2001. "Economies and Diseconomies: Estimating Electricity Cost Functions," Review of Industrial Organization, Springer;The Industrial Organization Society, vol. 19(2), pages 165-180, September.
    15. Margaux Escoffier & Emmanuel Hache & Valérie Mignon & Anthony Paris, 2019. "Determinants of investments in solar photovoltaic: Do oil prices really matter?," Working Papers hal-04141866, HAL.
    16. Rosendahl, Knut Einar, 2008. "Incentives and prices in an emissions trading scheme with updating," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 56(1), pages 69-82, July.
    17. Thapar, Sapan & Sharma, Seema & Verma, Ashu, 2018. "Key determinants of wind energy growth in India: Analysis of policy and non-policy factors," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 122(C), pages 622-638.
    18. Escoffier, Margaux & Hache, Emmanuel & Mignon, Valérie & Paris, Anthony, 2021. "Determinants of solar photovoltaic deployment in the electricity mix: Do oil prices really matter?," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 97(C).
    19. Lee, Myunghun, 2011. "Measurement of market power for the environmentally regulated Korean iron and steel manufacturing industry," Resources Policy, Elsevier, vol. 36(3), pages 249-254, September.
    20. Dong, C.G., 2012. "Feed-in tariff vs. renewable portfolio standard: An empirical test of their relative effectiveness in promoting wind capacity development," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 42(C), pages 476-485.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:gam:jeners:v:5:y:2012:i:10:p:4165-4185:d:20904. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: MDPI Indexing Manager (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.mdpi.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.