SURED 2016: Conference on Sustainable Resource Use and Economic Dynamics
June 16 2016
In the first week of June, Banyuls-Sur-Mer – a small town at the southern coast of France hosted one of the most important conference in the field of energy and environmental economics.
The SURED conference is organized biannually. This year, the conference included presentations by, among others, Lucas Bretschger, Pietro Paretto and Sjak Smulders. Number of excellent papers from the frontier of the field can be found on the conference website. We wish to highlight several of them.
Carsten Helm (University of Oldenburg) presented a microeconomic model, which describes how volatility of electricity prices affects the diffusion of renewable energy sources. The model predicts that, when share of Renewable Energy Sources reaches a certain threshold, price of electricity frequently hits zero limiting the returns from RES technologies and slowing down their diffusion. However, this does not stop the diffusion process. The author shows how the market could potentially work, when share of renewals is close to (or reaches) 100%.
The research of Ingela Alger (Toulouse School of Economics) stands on the cross-road of biology, economy and mathematics. She presents the model describing the evolution of human kind. The model predicts that evolution favors moral individuals over purely rational (and egoistic) individuals.
Jan Witajewski-Baltvilks from Institute of Structural Research presented his article, coauthored with two researchers from Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei. The article describes the macroeconomic drivers and macroeconomic consequences of energy-saving technological progress.
