Historical energy transitions: Speed, prices and system transformation ☆

By R. Fouquet. 2016

251 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The relatively rare and protracted nature of energy transitions implies that it is vital to look at historical experiences for lessons about how they might unfold in the future. The fastest historical sector-specific energy transitions observed here was thirty years. However, full energy transitions, involving all sectors and services, have taken much longer. Ultimately, the price of energy services played a crucial role in creating the incentives to stimulate energy transitions, but energy price shocks may have acted as a catalyst for stimulating processes that led to certain energy transitions. An additional key factor is whether the new technology offers new characteristics of value to the consumer, which can help create a market even when the initial price is higher. A crucial factor that can delay a transition is the reaction of the incumbent and declining industries. Nevertheless, governments have, in a few instances, created the institutional setting to stimulate energy transitions to low-polluting energy sources, and this could be done again, if the political will and alternative energy sources were available. Finally, past energy transitions have had major impacts on the incumbent industries which have declined, on economic transformations and on inequality.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Management Science and Operations Research, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ec47cd3a63019b1dc0b26c904791d8ff5db467a1

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Citations in the corpus

Historical energy price shocks and their changing effects on the economy (2017, background): “For instance, many have focussed on energy transitions and the diffusion of technologies (Ray, 1983, Grübler et al., 1999; Gales et al., 2007, Batoletto and Rubio, 2008, Fouquet, 2008, Fouquet, 2010, Rubio and Folchi, 2012, Kander et al., 2013, Grubler and Wilson, 2014, Fouquet, 2016).”
Low‐carbon transition risks for finance (2020, background): “Technological trajectories can also influence policy by opening up policy space through newly affordable alternatives (Schmidt & Sewerin, 2017) and closing it down through path dependencies (Fouquet, 2016).”
Contestation, contingency, and justice in the Nordic low-carbon energy transition (2017, unknown): “…include the temporal dynamics or speed at which a transition can take place (Sovacool, 2016) as well as historical trends (Grubler et al., 2016; Smil, 2016; Fouquet, 2016a, 2016b), politics and governance (Kern and Rogge, 2016), and even cost and sectoral dimensions (Sovacool and Geels, 2016).”
Policy mixes for incumbency: Exploring the destructive recreation of renewable energy, shale gas ‘fracking,’ and nuclear power in the United Kingdom (2017, unknown): “Furthermore, academic studies of ‘sustainability transitions’ (Markard et al. 2012) have increased attention to the means by which transitions might be speeded up in order address growing policy urgency (Kern & Rogge 2016; Sovacool 2016; Bromley 2016; Fouquet 2016).”
Fossilised Capital: Price and Profit in the Energy Transition (2021, background): “Indeed, this price-focused explanatory narrative dominates the historiography of past energy transitions more generally (Fouquet 2016).”