Tag Archives: Supply

Back from Germany

 A field of dead sunflowers  in Farsleben, Germany I have described Germany’s energy transition in earlier blogs (December 9 – 30, 2014, and October 1 – 8, 2019). As I mentioned in last week’s blog, I followed my trip to … Continue reading

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Fighting Russian Aggression & Learning How to Fight Global Wars in the Nuclear Age

Figure 1 – Source: Interest.co.nz The world is busy right now with several simultaneous global transitions that will leave an impact long after they are over. I have mentioned these transitions in earlier blogs. They include climate change, demographic saturation, … Continue reading

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“Peak” Oil:  Self-Limiting or Open-Ended?

The Age of Oil started around 1800, when drilling techniques started to become available to extract oil from the ground. Figure 1 shows the oil price changes normalized to a constant US$ (2014) from the American Civil War until 2015. … Continue reading

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Managing the Energy Transition: Specifics

Rex Tillerson, the former CEO of ExxonMobil, may have asked, “what good is it to save the planet if humanity suffers?” (September 21, 2021) but this week, in the context of COP26, the current CEO of Exxon expressed a different … Continue reading

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The Social Cost of Carbon

Things are changing. My courses start tomorrow. Originally, I was scheduled to teach face-to-face but for a variety of reasons, I’m back to online-only. Many of my colleagues are still scheduled for either face-to-face or “hybrid” teaching, where at least … Continue reading

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Negative Energy Pricing

Last week, I outlined some markers of how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the global energy transition and how that ties in with climate change in the long run. For instance, the global decrease in GDP and the resulting drop … Continue reading

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Bottom-Up Is Not Enough!

During the first two months of the new Trump administration, climate change and science were hardly visible on the agenda; things have changed in a major way over the last two weeks, with the government living up to some of … Continue reading

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A Redefinition of Sustainability: The Unilever Case

The 1987 United Nations’ Brundtland Report (World Commission on Environment and Development) was the first platform to articulate the idea of “sustainable development” to a wide audience. The Report framed it as “…development that meets the needs of the present … Continue reading

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Stuttering Energy Transitions: Germany – Storage

As I have mentioned before, electric utilities must necessarily store electricity in order to keep up with the fluctuations in consumer demands (July 29 – August 12 blogs). For example, all around the world (where people are connected to electrical … Continue reading

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Stuttering Energy Transitions: Germany – Producers

As I discussed in the in the last blog, the feed-in tariff that was introduced as a key element in the German energy transition has resulted in the Germans paying among the highest electricity rates in the world. It was … Continue reading

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