Conference Agenda

We provide quasi-experimental evidence on how subsidies for plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) affect household gasoline consumption once behavioral responses across the entire vehicle portfolio are taken into account. Using comprehensive Swedish administrative data and exploiting exogenous variation from a January 2020 subsidy reform tied to predetermined lease renewal cycles, we implement a fuzzy regression discontinuity design to identify causal effects of subsidized PHEV adoption. We find that subsidies induce households to adopt cleaner new vehicles, reducing gasoline consumption from newly acquired cars by approximately 93 liters per year. However, this reduction is largely offset by increased driving of retained gasoline vehicles, which raises gasoline use by about 75 liters annually. As a result, the net effect of the subsidy is a small and statistically insignificant reduction of roughly 18 liters of gasoline per household per year. Translating these estimates into abatement costs, we find implied abatement costs of $235 per ton of CO2 under renewable electricity, $375 under natural gas–fired generation, and $988 under coal-fired generation—substantially exceeding common estimates of the social cost of carbon and Sweden’s carbon tax.

Scaling sustainable aviation fuel production is central to aviation decarbonization, yet policymakers and investors face uncertainty over which conversion pathways can deliver economically viable fuel while generating meaningful regional economic benefits. Holding total sustainable aviation fuel fixed at one hundred million gallons, we evaluate the technoeconomic feasibility and regional economic impacts three technology pathways, Hydro-processed Esters and Fatty Acids, Fischer Tropsch, and Alcohol to Jet, in the southern US under both single-technology and mixed-portfolio deployment scenarios. We show that technology pathway choice alone fundamentally reshapes cost structures, co-product revenues, employment intensity, and tax generation. AtJ achieves lowest minimum selling prices, FT generates larger co-product streams and stronger regional economic spillovers. HEFA’s commercial maturity is constrained by high feedstock cost, low co-product production efficiency, and mediocre economic impact at the regional scale. Mixed-pathway portfolios mitigate trade-offs between cost competitiveness and regional economic impacts, providing an alternative solution to single-pathway deployment by building feedstock resiliency, diversifying economic impacts, and broadening employment opportunities. These findings demonstrate that SAF deployment strategy—not only production volume—plays a key role in determining economic outcomes, providing actionable guidance for regional planners and policymakers designing scalable, economically resilient SAF supply systems.

The study employs a stochastic modelling framework to evaluate cost-effectiveness of urban network leakage reduction under climate uncertainty. Probabilistic pattern of the water supply system based on hydrological inflow timeseries is simulated. The cost is measured both by financial variables (water treatment, network depreciation and maintenance and by urban welfare loss due to shortages and profit loss in agricultural sector. The model is tested to the drought-prone multipurpose reservoir system of Granada (Southern Spain) that exhibits the complexity and context-specific nature of water management under Mediterranean climate conditions. Leak reduction emerges as a cost-effective solution in Granada water system, tough at a striving leakage rate of 12.7%. The proposed framework enables robust evaluation also of other water policy (e.g. water reuse), as well policy mixing, for enhancing urban drought resiliency.

Urban transport electrification is widely promoted to reduce air pollution in highly polluted cities, yet its welfare implications depend on how commuters evaluate environmental attributes across modes and experience levels. Using a randomized discrete choice experiment with commuters in Delhi—one of the world’s most polluted megacities—we examine preferences for electric public and shared transport, capturing valuations across the income distribution. We find that prior usage of a mode fundamentally reshapes electric vehicle preferences. Commuters without prior experience of a mode initially place substantially more weight on local air pollution reductions than greenhouse gas emissions, but prior usage causes pollution concerns to fade. More striking, experience produces sharply divergent willingness-to-pay patterns: WTP declines for electric buses by 95% and for electric auto-rickshaws by 42%, for electric two-wheelers the sign reverses, while WTP for electric cars increases 65%. These mode-specific reversals suggest initial environmental enthusiasm gives way to performance-based evaluation, with critical implications for subsidy design, adoption forecasts, and the distributional incidence of electrification policies.

Climate change has intensified the frequency of droughts in Taiwan, challenging equitable and efficient water allocation, particularly for agriculture. With increasing competition from industrial and domestic sectors, agricultural and environmental water uses are frequently marginalized, leading to production losses and ecological degradation. This study employs economic experiments to evaluate alternative water allocation mechanisms under both drought and non-drought conditions. By simulating water markets, we assess the efficiency and fairness of policies incorporating agri-environmental water values—both monetized and non-monetized—and explore the effects of subsidies on water distribution outcomes. The primary aim is to compare allocation benefits under scenarios that include or exclude environmental water considerations and to determine whether market-based mechanisms with environmental water retention can enhance resource allocation. The experimental results reveal significant differences in bidding behaviors across water user types, with monetization and subsidies improving environmental water acquisition, especially during droughts. These findings offer empirical insights into how integrating environmental water rights and incentives can promote balanced, sustainable, and socially just water management. The study provides valuable policy implications for improving Taiwan’s resilience to climate-induced water scarcity through institutional reform and water market design.

This study investigates consumer preferences for passenger battery electric vehicles and their joint adoption with a residential solar photovoltaic system in Greece, where electric vehicle uptake remains low. Using discrete choice experiments, we analyse the preferences of 891 potential car buyers for conventional, hybrid, plug-in hybrid, and battery electric vehicles, comparing scenarios where a battery electric vehicle is offered alone or as a bundle with subsidised home solar photovoltaics. Results indicate that offering a technology bundle shifts consumer preferences, with the most notable effect being a decrease in the likelihood of choosing conventional vehicles. The willingness to pay for the bundle also exceeds that for battery electric vehicles, suggesting that installing PV systems adds value to BEVs. Key factors influencing adoption include purchase price, operating costs, wallbox subsidies, and normal charging time, while driving range and fast-mode charging do not seem to significantly affect consumer preferences. However, the analysis reveals substantial unobserved preference heterogeneity across all attributes. Robustness checks support the validity of our results. These findings suggest that integrated green technology bundles can accelerate low-carbon transport adoption, supporting the EU decarbonisation targets through complementary renewable energy and electromobility solutions

The rapid expansion of variable renewable energy (VRE) is reshaping power-system economics: as penetration rises, investment costs often fall through learning-by-doing, while integration costs may increase due to balancing, network, and adequacy needs. This study synthesizes evidence on this penetration–cost co-evolution and assesses how cost representations in planning and dispatch models affect inferred cost-optimal VRE shares. We summarize empirical and model-based learning effects for wind and solar and review integration-cost definitions, components, and quantification methods, showing that estimates diverge widely with system boundaries, allocation rules, and assumed flexibility. Comparing common model formulations, we find that incomplete treatment of learning and integration costs can bias long-term system design, typically underestimating system costs at high penetration and distorting cost-optimal VRE shares. Key modeling priorities and research gaps are highlighted for representing learning and integration costs consistently, thereby improving the robustness of VRE-oriented planning results.