Research
Ongoing projects:
EnergyWise is an interdisciplinary project aiming to synthesise and assess the most important impacts on society, economy, climate, and nature from the renewable energy expansion in Norway. The project will further integrate these impacts as costs/benefits or sustainability constraints in the national energy system model framework called TIMES.
With the expansions of the model made in the EnergyWise project, the TIMES framework will be used to analyse trade-offs and distributional effects of renewable energy expansion scenarios and recommend efficient and acceptable policies that can achieve a better balance between different interests.
Funder: Norwegian Research Council (project number 344392)
The green transition: Instrument design, employment and long-lived capital
The green transition involves a significant restructuring of the economy. Existing emission-intensive production capacity must be replaced by less polluting means of production, with associated job losses in emission-intensive industries and the phasing out of real capital in sectors being restructured or closed.
This project investigates environmental policy instruments that facilitate the green transition, with attention to employment, replacement of real capital and carbon leakage. The focus is on the medium-run, using dynamic models including explicit modelling of employment and sluggish supply structures.
The project will address three main topics:
Employment: Effects on the labour market may be one of the most central challenges faced when implementing the green transition, both from a welfare and political acceptance perspective. We will examine how environmental policy instruments can be designed to obtain cost efficient emission reductions and maintain overall employment.
Carbon leakage is perceived as a substantial obstacle to the implementation of the green transition, because emission regulations may result in a competitive disadvantage causing both jobs and emissions to move abroad – neither are clearly not the goal of the climate policy. This research project will investigate how to handle carbon leakage in a setting with imperfect mobility of labour and capital.
Committed emissions from existing and proposed energy production infrastructure represent more than the entire remaining carbon budget if the 1.5°C target is to be achieved. Energy infrastructure has substantial investment costs and can remain operative for decades once in place. This project examines which environmental policy instruments are best suited to direct investment away from emission-intensive fossil fuels and towards low-emission alternatives.
Our methodological approach is rooted in economics and combines economic theory with numerical modelling and econometrics.