Crawford School is The Australian National University’s public policy school, serving and influencing Australia, Asia and the Pacific through advanced policy research, graduate and executive education, and policy impact.
Corrective taxation of negative externalities is not unambiguously welfare improving in imperfectly competitive markets. Gordon Leslie shows that for carbon taxation in wholesale electricity markets, introducing a small carbon tax that reduces without eliminating the cost advantage of emissions-heavy, coal based electricity generation over gas based electricity generation can increase equilibrium carbon emissions for some fixed levels of demand.
Hugh Saddler: What has been happening to residential electricity demand in Australia?
Average annual electricity consumption per residential consumer has been falling steadily in every state since around 2009. The presentation will examine the factors which may explain this reduction and speculate on where electricity consumption may go in the next few years. It will also include some preliminary results from an analysis of how low income households use electricity.
With the energy transition or Energiewende, the German government aims to deeply reduce carbon dioxide emissions by increasing renewable energy to 60 per cent of total energy supply by mid-century, and by drastically reducing total energy consumption.