Unraveling the Historical Economies of Scale and Learning Effects for Desalination Technologies

As a technology develops and matures, both economies of scale and the lessons learned through experience drive down the cost over time. This article analyzes and separates the effects of economies of scale and learning through experience on historical cost reductions for three mature desalination technologies: multi‐effect distillation (MED), multi‐stage flash (MSF) distillation, and reverse osmosis (RO). The analysis suggests that learning has been the dominant driver for cost reductions, with learning rates of 23%, 30%, and 12% for MED, MSF, and RO, respectively, when the effects of scale are removed. The highest influence of economies of scale is found for MED, with an exponential scale coefficient of 0.71 and the largest difference between a traditional or scale‐free estimation of the learning rate. MSF and RO showed smaller differences between the traditional and de‐scaled learning rates (only 3%), pointing at learning as the main factor driving their historical cost reductions. However, a trend break observed over the last 10 years mirrors an exhaustion of the potential for technical improvements, as well as an increasing complexity and nonlinearity of the factors influencing the systems' cost. The findings provide useful data and insights for integrated and economic modeling frameworks, while providing guidance to prevent overestimations of the learning effect due to the confounding influence of economies of scale effects associated to historical unit upscaling processes

Detecting a Currency's Dominance or Dependence using Foreign Exchange Network Trees

In a system containing a large number of interacting stochastic processes, there will typically be many non-zero correlation coefficients. This makes it difficult to either visualize the system's inter-dependencies, or identify its dominant elements. Such a situation arises in Foreign Exchange (FX) which is the world's biggest market. Here we develop a network analysis of these correlations using Minimum Spanning Trees (MSTs). We show that not only do the MSTs provide a meaningful representation of the global FX dynamics, but they also enable one to determine momentarily dominant and dependent currencies. We find that information about a country's geographical ties emerges from the raw exchange-rate data. Most importantly from a trading perspective, we discuss how to infer which currencies are `in play' during a particular period of time

Irreversibilities and the Optimal Timing of Environmental Policy under Knightian Uncertainty

In this paper, we consider a problem in environmental policy design by applying optimal stopping rules. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the optimal timings at which the government should adopt environmental policies to deal with increases in greenhouse gas concentrations and to reduce emissions of SO2 or CO2 under the continuous-time Knightian uncertainty. Furthermore, we analyze the effects of increases in Knightian uncertainty on optimal environmental policies and the reservation value

Instabilities and robust control in natural resource management

Most renewable natural resources exhibit marked demographic and environmental stochasticities, which are exarcebated in management decisions by the uncertainty regarding the choice of an appropriate model to describe system dynamics. Moreover, demand and supply analysis often indicates the presence of instabilities and multiple equilibria, which may lead to management problems that are intensified by uncertainty on the evolution of the resource stock. In this paper the fishery management problem is used as an example to explore the potential of robust optimal control, where the objective is to choose a harvesting rule that will work under a range of admissible specifications for the stock-recruitment equation. The paper derives robust harvesting rules leading to a unique equilibrium, which could be helpful in the design of policy instruments such as robust quota systems.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Priority for the Worse Off and the Social Cost of Carbon

The social cost of carbon (SCC) is a monetary measure of the harms from carbon emission. Specifically, it is the reduction in current consumption that produces a loss in social welfare equivalent to that caused by the emission of a ton of CO2. The standard approach is to calculate the SCC using a discounted-utilitarian social welfare function (SWF)—one that simply adds up the well-being numbers (utilities) of individuals, as discounted by a weighting factor that decreases with time. The discounted-utilitarian SWF has been criticized both for ignoring the distribution of well-being, and for including an arbitrary preference for earlier generations. Here, we use a prioritarian SWF, with no time-discount factor, to calculate the SCC in the integrated assessment model RICE. Prioritarianism is a well-developed concept in ethics and theoretical welfare economics, but has been, thus far, little used in climate scholarship. The core idea is to give greater weight to well-being changes affecting worse off individuals. We find substantial differences between the discounted-utilitarian and non-discounted prioritarian SCC

Representing GASPEC with the World Gas Model

This paper presents results of simulating a more collusive behavior of a group of natural gas producing and exporting countries, sometimes called GASPEC. We use the World Gas Model, a dynamic, strategic representation of world gas production, trade, and consumption between 2005 and 2030. In particular, we simulate a closer cooperation of the GASPEC countries when exporting pipeline gas and liquefied natural gas; we also run a more drastic scenario where GASPEC countries deliberately withhold production. The results shows that compared to a Base Case, a gas cartel would reduce total supplied quantities and induce price increases in gas importing countries up to 22%. There is evidence that the natural gas markets in Europe and North America would be affected more than other parts of the world. Lastly, the vulnerability of gas importers worldwide on gas exporting countries supplies is further illustrated by the results of a sensitivity case in which price levels are up to 87% higher in Europe and North America, but non-GEC countries increase production by a mere 10%

Informational Efficiency in Futures Markets for Crude Oil

This paper develops a methodology to test whether recent developments on world oil markets are in line with the hypothesis of efficient markets. We treat the joint hypothesis problem as stated by Fama (1970), Fama (1991), that market efficiency can only be assessed in conjunction with a price model of market equilibrium. Data on spot and futures prices for Brent crude oil in the period 2002-2008 are used in combination with a multi factor model to investigate whether futures prices are efficient forecasts of future spot prices. The hypothesis of market efficiency is assessed by comparing the observed developments of crude oil spot prices to the ex-ante expected distributions of spot prices using the Rosenblatt transform. For the Brent crude oil futures market, the results are in line with the hypothesis of market efficiency in the short-term but during our sample period the hypothesis is refuted when forecast horizons of one year are considered. Our findings suggest that it can lead to rather wrong investment decisions when relying on longer-term crude oil futures prices and the information contained therein

A meta-analysis of the investment-uncertainty relationship

In this article we use meta-analysis to investigate the investment-uncertainty relationship. We focus on the direction and statistical significance of empirical estimates. Specifically, we estimate an ordered probit model and transform the estimated coefficients into marginal effects to reflect the changes in the probability of finding a significantly negative estimate, an insignificant estimate, or a significantly positive estimate. Exploratory data analysis shows that there is little empirical evidence for a positive relationship. The regression results suggest that the source of uncertainty, the level of data aggregation, the underlying model specification, and differences between short- and long-run effects are important sources of variation in study outcomes. These findings are, by and large, robust to the introduction of a trend variable to capture publication trends in the literature. The probability of finding a significantly negative relationship is higher in more recently published studies. JEL Classification: D21, D80, E22 1

Firing the Furnace? - An Econometric Analysis of Utilities' Fuel Choice

This paper attempts to predict the potential effects of CO2 emissions trading on fuel choice in the German electric power industry. By analyzing panel data (1968-1998) of major utilities, we show that the fuel mix of electric utilities is price inelastic. As a consequence, the implementation of a CO2 trading scheme will, if anything, only slightly induce interfuel substitution. Accordingly, low-carbon fuels will hardly replace lignite and hard coal through CO2 emissions trading, as long as abatement targets are not extremely ambitious. However,one cannot rule out that fuel prices may become more important for the utilities' fuel mix as a result of deregulation in the German power sector