Title
Costs assessments of European environmental policies
Abstract
The evolution of energy production in the European Union (EU) is going through a big change in recent years: the incidence of traditional fuels is diminishing gradually for increasing renewable energy sources (RES), due to international concerns over climate change and for energy security reasons. The aim of this paper is to construct a simulation model that identifies and estimates costs that may arise for a community of negotiating countries from opportunistic behavior of some country when defining environmental policies. In this paper, the model is applied specifically to the new 2030 Framework for Climate and Energy Policies (COM(2014) 0015) (EC, 2014 [11]) on the promotion of RES that commits EU governments to a common goal to increase the share of RES in final consumption to 27% by 2030. Costs faced by EU countries to achieve the RES target are different due to their endowment heterogeneity, the availability of RES, the diffusion process of cost improvements and the different instruments to support the development of the RES technologies. Given the still undefined participation agreement to reach the new overall RES target by 2030, we want to assess the potential cost penalty induced by free riding behavior. This could stem from some EU country, which avoids complying with the RES Directive. Our policy simulation exercise shows that costs increase more than proportionally with the non-participating country size, measured with GDP and CO2 emissions. Furthermore, we provide a model to analytically assess the likelihood each EU country may have to behave opportunistically within the negotiation process of the new proposal on EU RES targets (COM(2014) 0015).
Year
DOI
Venue
2016
10.1016/j.cor.2015.03.003
Computers & Operations Research
Keywords
Field
DocType
Simulation model,Renewable energy,Cost function,Opportunistic behavior
Mathematical optimization,Renewable energy,Endowment,Energy policy,Directive,Energy security,Free riding,Mathematics,Environmental economics,European union,Negotiation
Journal
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
66
0305-0548
1
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.36
0
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Simona Bigerna121.66
Carlo Andrea Bollino221.32
Silvia Micheli321.32