UAM. Departamento de Análisis Económico, Teoría Económica e Historia Económica
Abstract
The changes in the composition of the energy basket in the long run lead to energy
transitions. Primary energy substitution models allow addressing these phenomena.
However, the diversification paths of the energy mix of different countries in a long
term compared perspective have not been studied yet. This paper proposes an
indicator, based on the Herfindahl‐Hirschman Index, the Energy Mix Concentration
Index (EMCI), to quantify the degree of diversification of the primary energy basket of
eight European countries over the last two centuries. The results reveal that early
comers, which are large energy consumers, required a huge concentration of their
energy basket in the 19th century; however, the observed countries had converged to
similar levels of diversification of their energy mixes from the second half of the 20th
century, and more crucially after the oil crises. For some countries, today’s degree of
diversification is the largest in their energy histories, but it is not the case for all of
them. Our results suggest that small energy consuming countries would be able to
achieve higher diversification, and therefore to do a faster transition to a low carbon
economy, than large energy consumer