Socio-Economic Challenges and Opportunities of the Energy Transition

Introduction

ENERGY-IN-TRANSITION will push the frontier in energy and environmental economics by addressing and quantifying novel socioeconomic challenges and opportunities that arise as the Energy Transition moves forward.

Need for New Policies

Firstly, there is an urgent need to design new Energy Transition policies while re-designing existing ones. In particular, the prospect that Green Hydrogen might help reduce our dependency on fossil fuels has accelerated the need to define its regulation. Likewise, the recent energy crisis has triggered the debate about the re-design of electricity markets.

Research Gaps

However, there is no academic research guiding these fundamental policy changes. ENERGY-IN-TRANSITION will pioneer state-of-the-art research on Green Hydrogen regulation and electricity market design through theoretical, empirical, and simulation analyses.

Distributional Consequences

Secondly, it is paramount to assess and address the distributional consequences of Energy Transition policies (across regions, workers, and households). In particular, I will delve into the local socioeconomic impacts of the phase-out of coal plants and the phase-in of renewables.

Local Effects

While existing research has analyzed the global effects of this structural change, evidence of the local effects is scant. Local opposition against renewables, which has become a major obstacle to their deployment, testifies to the relevance of the local effects.

Methodological Advances

ENERGY-IN-TRANSITION will use recent advances in survey design to provide novel evidence on the local opposition toward renewables while contributing to identifying effective solutions to curb it.

Rooftop Solar Policies

Moreover, I will quantify the distributional consequences of rooftop solar policies across households and investigate the under-studied possibility of re-designing them to mitigate their adverse effects.

Benefits for Academics and Policymakers

Academics will benefit from the discovery of new methodological approaches to analyze the Energy Transition, while policymakers will gain insight into the solutions for the most compelling socio-economic challenges ahead.