Abstract
While Chaps. 1–7 are dedicated to overarching issues and systemic relationships, Chaps. 8–13 of this book turn to the individual markets for energy. Starting from the pertinent constraints imposed by the laws of science and engineering, the discussions revolve around respective costs, supply and demand, forms of competition, and resulting prices, taking account of peculiarities that shape consumer preferences. In an attempt to keep the analysis reasonably simple, the existence of the respective other markets and prices prevailing on them have been taken as given, thus abstracting from the interdependencies between the several energy markets. In addition, the question why politicians want to see certain market outcomes rather than others, e.g. by subsidizing renewables or prohibiting the use of fracking technologies, remains mainly unanswered. In that sense, energy policy is outside the scope of this book.
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Notes
- 1.
Answers to this question would require a good deal of so-called public choice theory, a branch of economics that analyzes the behavior of voters, politicians, and public officials (see e.g. Buchanan and Tullock 1962).
- 2.
As argued by Hayek (1960, p. 32), information about potential innovations is distributed among a multitude of agents in an economy, who moreover have an interest in keeping it to themselves rather than sharing it with a policy maker.
- 3.
The same holds for predicting with any precision the costs of realizing ambitious scenarios of climate protection within this century.
References
Buchanan, J. M., & Tullock, G. (1962). The calculus of consent: Logical foundations of constitutional democracy. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Hayek, F. A. (1960). The constitution of liberty. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Markowitz, H. M. (1952). Portfolio selection. Journal of Finance, 12, 77–91.
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Zweifel, P., Praktiknjo, A., Erdmann, G. (2017). Epilogue. In: Energy Economics. Springer Texts in Business and Economics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-53022-1_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-53022-1_14
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