The role of policy in energy transitions: lessons from the energy liberalisation era

By Michael Pollitt. 2012

243 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The aim of this paper is to discuss the period of energy privatisation and liberalisation which began in the 1980s within its wider historical context. The key issues are what has been learned from this recent period, and how significant is it in the light of an energy transition to low carbon energy system by 2050? Energy liberalisation has led to positive and globally widespread but modest efficiency gains but a lack of clearly visible direct benefits to households in many countries. It has significantly improved the governance of monopoly utilities (via independent regulators), the prospects for competition and innovation, and the quality of policy instruments for environmental emissions control (through the emergence of trading mechanisms). We conclude that it is not liberalisation per se that will determine the movement towards a low carbon energy transition, but the willingness of societies to bear the cost, which will be significant no matter what the extent of liberalisation.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/98f635c3b704bf3e2eb586592246efb1863f1379

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

1. S. Hall
2. David Newbery
3. Michael Grubb
4. Mark Davis
5. Donal Brown
6. F. Nicolli
7. Francesco Vona
8. David Popp

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

1. Donal Brown
2. Mark Davis
3. S. Hall
4. Michael Grubb
5. M. Imran
6. Zafar Ali Khan
7. F. Nicolli
8. David Newbery

Citations in the corpus

• UK Electricity Market Reform and the Energy Transition:Emerging Lessons (2018, background): “But while there are reports to Government evaluating EMR (e.g. Grant Thornton and Pöyry, 2015), and studies of electricity market reforms driven by EU Directives (e.g. Pollitt, 2012), to our knowledge, there has been no academic empirical assessment of the emerging lessons from the reforms.”
• Heterogeneous policies, heterogeneous technologies: The case of renewable energy (2016, background): “As highlighted by Popp et al. (2011), time trends or year-fixed effects rule out the possibility that the knowledge stock (K STOCK), which grows by construction through time, only picks up other tendencies for investment to increase over time.”
• A Critical Review of Sustainable Energy Policies for the Promotion of Renewable Energy Sources (2020, background): “This offers insurance payments equal to the difference between the average wholesale market price and a fixed strike price in the CfD for eligible large-scale renewable generation [42].”
• What is prosumerism for? Exploring the normative dimensions of decentralised energy transitions (2020, background): “However, evidence from the energy liberalisation era challenges these assumptions, with few consumers switching suppliers [128], resulting in oligopolistic trading practices [56].”