Finished PhD Theses

• Matthias Kalkuhl

The Calculus of Climate Policy: Carbon Pricing and Technology Policies for Climate Change Mitigation

Technical University Berlin, Fakultät VI - Planen Bauen Umwelt.

This thesis examines the role of carbon pricing and low-carbon technology policies for reducing
CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels. Policies are evaluated according to their
impact on welfare, emissions, fossil resource rents and energy prices. For the economic
analysis, small analytical partial equilibrium models and, most importantly, the elaborate
numerical intertemporal general equilibrium model PRIDE (Policy and Regulatory Instruments
in a Decentralized Economy) are developed and studied. A major focus of these
models lies on the intertemporal incentive effects of policies on fossil resource extraction
and investments into new low-carbon technologies. An innovative strength of the PRIDE
model is to calculate the welfare-maximizing potential of policies like carbon taxes and
emissions trading schemes as well as subsidies, feed-in-tariffs or portfolio standards for
renewable energy and carbon capture and sequestration (CCS).

The results indicate that a price on carbon emissions – established through a carbon tax
or an emissions trading scheme – is the most important climate policy in the long run; reducing
emissions permanently with subsidies on ‘clean’ technologies becomes very expensive.
Technology policies, however, may have an important role in the short to medium run: First,
technology policies addressing innovation market failures can increase welfare and reduce
mitigation costs substantially even under a ‘perfect’ emissions trading scheme. Second,
technology policies can serve as a temporary ‘second-best’ policy to reduce emissions when
an ‘optimal’ carbon price cannot be established due to political economy reasons. Finally,
technology policies may help to reduce the distributional conflict concerning fossil resource
rents and the social conflict regarding increasing energy prices. The analytical and numerical
results further highlight the relevance and the need of creating a global public institution that
manages the use of the atmosphere and the associated ‘climate rent’ and fosters investments
into low-carbon technologies.

• Markus Haller

CO2 Mitigation and Power System Integration of Fluctuating Renewable Energy Sources: A Multi-Scale Modeling Approach

Technical University Berlin, Fakultät VI - Planen Bauen Umwelt. pdf

Decarbonizing the electricity sector is of vital importance for mitigating greenhouse gas
emissions due to increasing power demand, but also because of the broad portfolio of low
carbon power generation options. Emission reduction policies are likely to incentivise an
expansion of renewable power generation capacities far beyond current levels.
This thesis investigates the question of how renewable power generation can contribute
to mitigate CO2 emissions. It analyzes the system integration challenges that result from
large shares of variable and spatially dispersed renewable power generation, how an expansion
of long distance transmission and storage capacities can facilitate system integration,
and how system integration issues – and the availability of integration options –
affect long term strategies for power system decarbonization. More specific, it investigates
if (and how) Europe can reach its ambitious power sector decarbonization targets
by expanding renewable generation capacities. These questions are addressed in a series
of model-based studies.

Results show that power system decarbonization in general and expansion of renewable
power generation in specific play a crucial role for economy-wide mitigation efforts. They
also demonstrate that investment decisions in transmission, storage and generation capacities
are tightly interrelated. Adequate expansion of transmission and storage facilitates
the integration of renewable supply, and limiting the availability of these options affects
deployment and spatial allocation of renewable generation capacities.
It is shown that until 2050, Europe and the Middle East / North African (MENA) regions
can achieve power system CO2 emission reductions of 90% (relative to 2010) by expanding
renewable power generation – without relying on CCS or building new nuclear power
plants. This target can be met without large-scale electricity transfers between Europe
and MENA regions, but inside Europe, a clear pattern of importing and exporting countries
emerges. Meeting the 90% emission reduction target leads to an increase of average
electricity prices to 8.7 ct/kWh, if transmission and storage capacities are adequately expanded
(compared to 6.8 ct/kWh in the baseline scenario). If transmission capacities are
limited to current levels, electricity prices increase to 10.1 ct/kWh, and the requirements
for storage capacities increase significantly.

Cost-efficient expansion pathways until 2050 are far from linear: Until 2030, the system
is characterized by a mixture of wind and fossil generation, followed by a switch to a wind
and solar based generation mix. This transition on the generation side results in different
integration challenges, and it changes the interregional patterns of power transfer and the
way the existing transmission infrastructure is used.

Feasible mitigation levels that can be achieved by renewable generation capacities are
shown not to be limited by their technical potential, but by system integration issues.
Electricity prices escalate if emission caps exceed a certain limit. In the presented scenarios,
this threshold varies between 70% and 95% CO2 reductions, depending on the
availability of transmission and storage expansion. This shows that a coordinated expansion
of renewable generation capacities and system integration options is crucial for
achieving ambitious decarbonization targets.

• Alexander Lorenz

Uncertainty & Learning in Global Climate Analysis
Technical University Berlin, Fakultät VI - Planen Bauen Umwelt. pdf

Climate change, the 21st centuries challenge for cooperative human decision making, is surrounded by large uncertainties concerning the scientific understanding of the climate system, of climate change induced changes of natural and social systems and of the impacts of those changes on human economic activities and human welfare in general. Parts of these uncertainties will be resolved as science advances and new observations are made. This learning will allow to refine the decisions undertaken to cope with the climate problem.
This thesis is dedicated to examine the role of uncertainty and future learning in the formal assessment of optimal global mitigation strategies for global warming. The central contributions of this study are contained within three research articles.The first article investigates the validity of the cost-effectiveness framework when applied to the case of climate targets under uncertainty and future learning. The study highlightens two major conceptual problems of this formalism, namely the possibility of negative value of information and infeasibility of the whole decision criterion. As a consequence an alternative decision framework is proposed, the so called cost-risk analysis, that avoids those conceptual problems but still remains based on climate targets.
The second article is motivated by the clash between the general scientific intuition that epistemic uncertainties about the climate system and climate damages should play a major role in determining optimal mitigation policies (and the resulting welfare gain compared to doing nothing) and the results from the integrated assessment models that show only insignificant influence of those uncertainties. We introduce a method of assessing the importance of uncertainty both in its impact on optimal policy and in its impact on the welfare gain from acting upon climate change. We then use a representation of the integrated assessment model MIND that allows to link the decomposed value of climate policy to the structural form of the functions representing the climate cause-effect chain, thereby understanding the negligible effect of uncertainty from the model structure. Finally we propose some changes to the model structure that result in large impacts from including uncertainty. The third article investigates the circumstances under which the anticipation of future learning about tipping-point-like threshold climate damages would be important for the determination of near term mitigation decisions. We show that this is only the case if the learning occurs within a narrow anticipation window. In this case far stronger near term mitigation is optimal to keep the option open to avoid the threshold in case it turns out to lead to severe damages. The location and width of this window is found to be sensitive to the DM’s flexibility to reduce emissions. If reducing this flexibilitiy in the MIND model, may this represent political or social barriers, the anticipation window moves towards the present and broadens considerably, thereby increasing the importance of including future learning into the analysis of climate change.
The articles are put into perspective by an introduction into the field that lays out the general linking research questions and general conclusions.

• Matthias Schmidt

Climate Policy under Uncertainty
Technical University Berlin, Fakultät VI - Planen Bauen Umwelt. pdf

Submission:
August 2011

The challenges posed by climate change are unprecedented in scale and scope. Climate change is global in its origins and impacts. It involves time horizons of hundreds of years and many generations. And, last but not least, it is surrounded by great uncertainty, which is the focus of this thesis. More specifically, this thesis intends to contribute to the identification of climate policies that do justice to the pervasiveness of uncertainty in climate change. In its core it contains four research articles.
The first article shows that the combination of uncertainty about climate damages with the fact that climate damages will be distributed heterogeneously across the population can be an argument for substantially stricter climate policy, i.e. stronger emissions reductions. The article also discusses how insurance and self-insurance can, at least theoretically, mitigate this result and thus permit weaker climate policy.
The second article highlights some major conceptual problems of cost-effectiveness analysis of climate policies for given climate targets. The problems occur once it is taken into account that uncertainty will be reduced in the future, which is an important aspect of climate change. In consequence, we propose an alternative decision criterion that avoids the problems by including a trade-off between the probability of violating the target and aggregate mitigation costs.
The third article investigates the circumstances under which learning about tipping elements in the climate system is an argument for stricter or weaker climate policy. It shows that learning is an argument for stricter policy if it is expected to happen in a narrow “anticipation window” in time, and that it can be neglected otherwise.
The fourth article reviews approaches to uncertainty in integrated assessment models of climate change with corresponding results. The complexity of the matter demands a variety of complementary approaches and a later synthesis of results. This article intends to summarize and structure this process and the respective literature.
The research articles are framed by an introduction to the field and general conclusions.

• Michael Jakob

Reframing International Climate Policy: Essays on Development Issues and  Fragmented Regimes
Technical University Berlin, Fakultät VI - Planen Bauen Umwelt. pdf

Submission:
Juni
2011

The research presented in this thesis is based on the hypotheses that (a) one of the main reasons why recent climate negotiations have failed to achieve significant progress is that they have not paid sufficient attention to the priorities of developing countries, and that international climate policy will increasingly be conducted within fragmented regimes in which the spatial or temporal flexibility to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is constrained.
Our empirical estimates for a cross-section of countries suggest that leapfrogging to more efficient and cleaner technologies in poor countries does not occur automatically and that without binding commitments to reduce GHG emissions, continued economic growth can be expected to bring energy consumption and carbon emissions in emerging and developing countries close to levels prevailing in industrialized countries.
For the case of China, we identify economic growth as the dominant factor behind increasing carbon emissions. Using an extended Kaya-decomposition, we find that the effect of economic growth exceeds the impact of the pronounced shift to coal that has taken place in China’s energy systems in 1971-2007 by one order of magnitude. Numerical model results reaffirm China’s important role for a global, cost-efficient mitigation effort and underline the importance of lowering the carbon intensity of energy production to achieve emissions reductions in China.
Comparing the results from three state-of-the-art climate-energy-economy models emphasizes the importance of spatial and temporal flexibility of mitigation efforts:
postponing a global climate agreement to 2020 could raise the costs of a 450ppm CO2-only target by at least about half; with a delay to 2030 it may become infeasible to achieve. We also show that for individual regions early action can in fact reduce mitigation costs if the effect of avoiding lock-in of carbon-intensive energy infrastructure prevails over the higher costs associated with the additional mitigation burden borne by early movers.
In the absence of a global climate agreement a global carbon market could emerge in a bottom-up fashion by linking of emissions trading systems. In this scenario the occurrence of carbon leakage actually depends on which industries are linked under a joint permit market: a symmetric link from the EU to a system without full cap bears some negative implications but can still increase welfare if the gains-from-trade dominate. In the case of
asymmetric linking (i.e. when the respective output goods are imperfect substitutes) leakage is prevented and may even become negative.
The occurrence of carbon leakage in a fragmented climate regime does not automatically justify the use of trade measures, such as border tax adjustments. We show that neither production- nor consumption-based approaches of accounting for carbon emissions constitute optimal policy instruments. Whether a consumption-based policy prevents or reduces leakage depends on specific parameter values. Empirical data suggest that if the EU or the US were to apply border tax adjustment on imports from China, carbon leakage would in effect increase.

• Michael Pahle

Investments in Liberalized Electricity Markets and the Low-Carbon Energy Transition: A Mixed-method Analysis of the German Case
Technical University Berlin, Fakultät VI - Planen Bauen Umwelt. pdf

Because of the high number of low-cost mitigation options the power sector will play an important role in combating global climate change. Given the current worldwide trend of liberalization, the main challenge is to incentivize investments in low-carbon technologies under market rules. This thesis investigates the combined questions of how investments are made in liberalized electricity markets, and to which extent climate policy instruments are effective in inducing cleaner technology choice. It uses Germany as a case study, where during the last years a considerable number of new coal power plants have been brought on the way. This "dash for coal", apparently contradicting political efforts to transform the energy system, serves as the guiding issue around which several aspects of the aforementioned questions are investigated.

The first analysis explores the drivers and decision factors that likely triggered the "dash for coal". Because no integrated theory of investments in liberalized electricity markets yet exists, it compiles a list of potentially influential economic, technological and sociopolitical factors in a first step. Examining these factors in more detail in a second step, it turns out that the extensive coal investments can be attributed to six main reasons. They are: (1) replacement requirements due to the nuclear phase out, (2) the onset of a new investment cycle in the power market, (3) favourable economic and technological prospects for coal compared to natural gas in the long run, (4) a status-quo bias of investors in regard to future renewable deployment, (5) explicit political support for coal, and (6) the ineffectiveness of public protest in hampering new projects. Two of these are looked at in more detail in the succeeding parts of this thesis.

The second analysis deals with how emission certificate allocations had distorted fossil investments in favour of coal technologies. The EU Emission Trading Scheme (EU ETS), implemented in 2005, was set up to incentivize cleaner investments by putting a price on CO2 emission through tradable certificates. However, in its first phase initial certificate allocations for new plants in Germany were technology specific, leading to a considerably higher number of total certificates for coal compared to natural gas. Because suppliers incurred windfall profits by passing-through the opportunity costs of these certificates, coal plants were expected to receive higher additional cash flows than natural gas plants, which effectively subsidized coal. In fact, results suggest that disproportionate windfall profits compensate more than half the total capital costs of a hard coal plant. Only auctioning of certificates or a single best available technology benchmark would have made natural gas the predominant technology of choice. This underlines that implementation details had a great impact on investment incentives, unintentionally increasing the edge of coal over natural gas rather than decreasing it.
The third analysis leaves the level of the single investor and looks at how the market as a whole responds to a price on CO2 under the situation of a nuclear phase out that induces consideral replacement investments. More specifically, it investigates technology choice and the optimal CO2 price level from a welfare perspective. Motivated by the structure of the German market where four big suppliers own the major share of capacities, imperfect  competition with strategic behaviours by these suppliers is assumed. Moreover, based on the finding of the first analysis, investments in coal plants are limited to the strategic suppliers, which adds a so called technological market power. Model results indicate that in such a setting investments in natural gas occur at lower CO2 price levels and more gradually than in a perfect competitive market. This happens due to the strategic reduction of output that increases electricity prices, which in turn makes natural gas profitable even when the comparative advantage in emission costs is still low. In a perfect competitive market though, investments switch from exclusively coal to exclusively natural gas when the CO2 price is 37 EUR/t or higher. Furthermore, the impact of market power on overall welfare is relatively moderate and losses never exceed 1% if the price of CO2 is set at the optimal level. This shows that a price on CO2 can indeed be a suited instrument to induce investments into cleaner technologies, especially natural gas. Nevertheless, relatively high prices are needed for a fundamental transition, and it remains to be seen if this will become reality in the future.

• Lavinia Baumstark

Investment Strategies for Climate Change Mitigation
Technical University Berlin, Fakultät VI - Planen Bauen Umwelt. pdf

Submission:
Juni
2011

The substantial threat of anthropogenic climate change implies the reducing of greenhouse gas emissions. This thesis deals with the costs and strategies of climate change mitigation. In particular, investment strategies for climate change mitigation are investigated. The thesis is separated into five parts each focusing on subquestions of the overall research question. After an introduction into the problem of climate change and the important macro-economic mechanisms for mitigation, these subquestions are answered in separate chapters. For the analysis Integrated Assessment models are used.

First, the impacts of technological spillovers under climate policies are analyzed by means of a multi-regional model with technological change in form of interregional spillovers. Model results indicate that the higher the ratio between the spillover intensities for energy and labour efficiency, the lower are mitigation costs. As well, first-mover advantages and commitment incentives for climate policy scenarios are investigated. A multi-regional hybrid model with a more complex energy system is used for studying investments into energy technologies in detail. In climate policy scenarios the entire energy consumption is reduced, while renewable energy and CCS technologies are expanded immediately. Different regions follow quite different mitigation strategies. While ambitious climate targets can be reached with moderate global costs, the regional costs show a high variance. In addition, Integrated Assessment models are used to investigate what happens if the
world will not agree on a climate friendly policy within the next years. The impacts of early investments into renewable energy technologies in first-best and second-best worlds are analyzed. Mitigation costs increase significantly, if the climate policy implementation is delayed. In contrast, early deployment of renewable energy technologies reduces the global costs. Within a five-region hybrid model the impacts of dynamics and direction of technological change under climate change mitigation are studied. It turns out that mitigation costs and strategies are quite sensitive to these variables. Further experiments indicate that the impacts depend on the set of available technologies. For studying the role of endogenous technological change for climate change mitigation, this model is
extended by a new formulation of efficiency improvements. It turns out that investments into the efficiency of some energy sectors play a crucial role for low mitigation costs. In climate policy scenarios, the increased mitigation costs of technological restrictions can be overcome by R&D investments into energy efficiencies.

However, the results of this thesis demonstrate the important role of investment strategies for climate change mitigation costs. The world gains from early investments into both a broad portfolio of technologies and energy efficiencies. Thereby the immediate support and high diversity of investments mainly provide low mitigation costs.

• Christian Flachsland

Towards a Global Carbon Market? Linking Systems, Adding Sectors
Technical University Berlin, Fakultät VI - Planen Bauen Umwelt. pdf

Submission:
Dezember 2010

Abstract:
International emission trading is prominently discussed as a policy instrument for mitigating global greenhouse gas emissions. The articles assembled in this cumulative thesis aim at enhancing the understanding of the economic and political implications of this climate policy approach.
Five potential future international carbon market configurations are identified and analyzed with regard to their environmental effectiveness, cost effectiveness, and political feasibility. It turns out that the choice between top-down and bottom-up architectures entails a trade-off between environmental effectiveness on the one hand, and political feasibility on the other. The basic reason is that at least initially a full global trading regime and the Kyoto approach promise to cover a larger fraction of global emissions, thus enabling more significant global emission cuts and providing better protection against carbon leakage. But while a high participation rate is beneficial from the global environmental point of view, it complicates political coordination due to the larger number of political parties, especially regarding the inevitable distributional challenges as well as the need for regulatory coordination. Regarding cost effectiveness, bottom-up linking of regional trading systems is the superior approach.
The analysis of linking regional cap-and-trade systems from a policymaker’s perspective identifies a number of merits and demerits of this approach. Potential benefits include standard gains from trade; the possibility of ’anti-leakage’ from linking a sectorally fragmented cap-and-trade system to asymmetric sectors in developing countries; enhanced policy stability by creating an additional vertical layer in the multi-level governance of domestic emission sources; elimination of competitiveness concerns across linked systems; and the political signal of a multilateral climate policy initiative. Potential disadvantages include welfare losses from deteriorating terms-of-trade and intensification of disbenefits from suboptimal policies; a range of distributional concerns; and the need for close regulatory coordination across linked systems and the related loss of souvereignty due to the inevitable spillovers of regulatory decisions.
Finally, this thesis examines the option of including the road transport sector into capand-trade systems. An empirical analysis of EU ETS road transport inclusion shows that this option does not raise competitiveness concerns from rising EU allowance prices. The point of regulation should be chosen upstream.

• Robert Marschinski

Climate Change Policy in a Second-Best World - An Analysis of Policy Options under Conditions of Partial Cooperation and Uncertainty
Technical University Berlin, Fakultät VII - Wirtschaft und Management  pdf

Submission:
Dezember 2010

Abstract:
Starting from the premise that climate change policy-making takes place under considerable uncertainty and suffers from a lack of international cooperation, and that this prevents the implementation of a global first-best policy, the present thesis poses the second-best question of what can be done despite these constraints and compares different policy options.
Under conditions of partial cooperation, two questions of the second-best type arise: (i) What can already cooperating countries do to ensure their climate policies are effective and cost-efficient? (ii) How can the highest possible level of international cooperation be achieved? In this thesis, these issues are treated by assessing different institutional forms of emissions trading, in particular the ‘linking’ of permit markets, and, also, by adopting a game-theoretic view to analyze in how far trade sanctions can help to broaden international cooperation. The results show (a) how institutional incompatibilities and general equilibrium effects could reduce the benefits of a linking agreement, and (b) that tariffs have a significant potential to increase participation in a climate agreement.
Uncertainty, and how it affects different policy instruments, is the other second-best aspect investigated. So-called intensity targets, which index emission targets on GDP, are analyzed with regard to their effect on cost-uncertainty, and their compatibility with international emissions trading. The results suggest that due to the increased complexity and the potentially only modest benefits of an intensity target, conventional absolute targets remain a robust choice for a cautious policy-makers.

• Michael Lüken

Distributive Impacts of Global Climate Change Mitigation - Effects of Technology, Emission Permit Allocation and Energy Trade
Technical University Berlin, Fakultät VI - Planen Bauen Umwelt. Link

Submission: November 2010

Abstract:
The thesis provides an improved understanding of major drivers influencing regional mitigation costs. It analyzes the effects of the availability of low-carbon technologies, emission permit allocation schemes and energy trade on the welfare redistributions due to climate change mitigation. The methodologic novelty of the thesis is the consideration of the three dimensions of technology, permit allocation and energy trade in a comprehensive model framework (REMIND), together with the development of a formal economic decomposition method that renders a quantification of the impacts possible.
The analysis confirms (and sharpens) results from previous studies, on the relevance of a broad portfolio of low-carbon technologies and of endowments with tradable factors such as energy carriers or tradable emission permits for global and regional mitigation costs.  But the thesis concludes that interrelations among the dimensions of technology and trade play a crucial role for the distributive impacts of mitigation. In particular, a broad portfolio of low-carbon technologies reduces the monetary equivalents of traded emission permits, so that a variation of the initial permit allocation scheme has a lower redistributive impact. Also, the size of energy trade effects is subject to the availability of technologies. Finally, technologies can take the role to render a new trade flow possible, for example an electricity transmission technology, which turns an untradable endowment (e.g., a huge solar potential) into an indirectly tradable (by electricity generation).

• Kai Lessmann

Endogenous Technological Change in Strategies for Mitigating Climate Change
Technical University Berlin, Fakultät VI - Planen Bauen Umwelt. pdf

Submission:
2009

Abstract:
This thesis suggests that induced technological change has potential to reduce the burden that climate change mitigation puts on the economy. Furthermore, international cooperation on climate policy, which may trigger this induced technological change, may be achieved by linking climate negotiations to other issues.  The starting point are two assumptions: first, action to mitigate climate change is necessary, and second, technologies will play a key role in this effort.  There is empirical evidence that technological change is induced by policies.  However, previous assessments of such induced technological change (ITC) have been ambiguous.  Moreover,  a clear climate policy is required in order to induce the technological progress.  However, the literature on international environmental agreements suggest that the prospect for global climate policy is not bright.  This raises two broad research questions:  First, what is the role of ITC for climate change mitigation?  And second, how can we achieve a global policy that triggers this technological change?

• Sebastian Wienges

Governance in Global Policy Networks. Individual Strategies and Collective Action in Five Sustainable Energy-Related Type II Partnerships.
University of Potsdam, Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences. pdf of summary

Submission:
April 2008

Abstract:
Energy spurs social and economic development and has multiple effects on the ecological and social environment of societies. Energy access for socially equitable development, energy security for sustainable economic growth, and the mitigation of climate change all represent issues of long-term developments, whose effects are not fully reflected in incentive structures in energy markets. Consequently, this study will distinguish six forms of market failures in energy markets impeding the sustainability of social, environmental and economic development. International governance mechanisms are supposed to overcome those long-term problems. At the same time governance mechanisms must allow to consider short-term interests of various actors in order to incentivize and enable these actors to comply. Strategies for long-term policies, therefore, have to build in flexibility in governance mechanisms and include state as well as non-state actors. The Johannesburg World Summit 2002 produced a number of such partnerships committed to sustainable development. Based on research on the five sustainable energy-related global policy networks of GVEP, REEEP, GNESD, EUEI, and REN21 and conducted expert interviews, this study will analyze the effectiveness of global policy networks, compare the effectiveness of the five explored networks and their governance practices, and aim to identify instruments of effective global environmental governance. Hence, the thesis will draft a strategy for network governance how to reconcile long-term and short-term interests. Additionally, the study will develop how to design institutionalized instruments to map and harness common good resources like knowledge and good contacts contained in networks in order to support systematized reaping benefits of potentials for cooperation among network partners.

• Elmar Kriegler

Imprecise probability analysis for integrated assessment of climate change.
University of Potsdam, Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, Institute of Physics. pdf

Submission:
2005

Abstract:
We present an application of imprecise probability theory to the quantification of uncertainty in the integrated assessment of climate change. Our work is motivated by the fact that uncertainty about climate change is pervasive, and therefore requires a thorough treatment in the integrated assessment process. Classical probability theory faces some severe difficulties in this respect, since it cannot capture very poor states of information in a satisfactory manner. A more general framework is provided by imprecise probability theory, which offers a similarly firm evidential and behavioural foundation, while at the same time allowing to capture more diverse states of information. An imprecise probability describes the information in terms of lower and upper bounds on probability.

• Nico Bauer

Carbon Capturing and Sequestration - An Option to Buy Time?
University Potsdam Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences. pdf

Submission: January 2005

Abstract:
The thesis uses the MIND model framework as a hybrid model integrating an economic growth model of the Ramsey-type with an energy system model and a climate system model. The use of a hybrid model that integrates these various systems is suggested by the complex problem at hand and justified by the dynamics and feedbacks between the systems. The CO2 emission mitigation options are related to investments and their social optimal timing and extent is computed by maximising an intertemporal social welfare function. Although this function is subject to various points of critique it takes into account issues of intergenerational equity. The use of CCS and the other options depends on assumptions of various exogenous model parameters. The extensive sensitivity analysis undertaken in this thesis reveals that the property of CCS being an option to buy time is robust for a broad range of parameter values. It turns out that the potential to introduce renewable energy technologies is highly important for the use of CCS. Imposing such a constraint reduces the ability to switch to alternative energy sources giving features of CCS like the leakage rate a higher significance. The more constrained renewable energy sources are the more sensitive are the results regarding the extent and the welfare impact of CCS with respect to parameter variations of the CCS technology. Tight constraints on renewables and low leakage rates can even make CCS an option that will be used throughout the 21st century.

• Katrin Gerlinger

Muster globaler anthropogener CO2-Emissionen. Sozio-ökonomische Determinanten und ihre Wirkung.
PhD Thesis University Potsdam, Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences.

Submission:
June 2004

Abstract:
The thesis analyses the main driving forces for CO2 in different world regions. It uses the famous Kaya identity as a starting point for a cluster analysis. Based on Cluster analysis, it provides ideal types of cluster sharing the same causes of non-sustainability. These ideal types are used as a socio-economic 'macroscope' which may enable researchers to identify patterns of sustainability.

Link to finished Master and Diploma Theses