Energy Economics and Policy FS 11

Details (Vorlesungsverzeichnis) 351-0514-00L

Prof. Thomas F. Rutherford

Syllabus

The Top 10 Term Papers (by popular vote)

Final Examination

Wednesday, 8 June 2011, 13:15-14:45,  HG F 1

Some sample questions: fuel taxation, leakage.

Lecture Notes

Lecture 1a: An Introduction to the Course

Lecture 1b: Marshall on Natural Gas

Lecture 2: Analysis of Competitive Markets

Lecture 3: Term paper, activity analysis and embodied carbon

Lecture 4: The Derived Demand for Coal

Lecture 5: The End of Oil (part 1, part 2, handout)

Lecture 6: GAMS, Hotelling and CES Demand

Lecture 7: Natural Gas and Economics of Monopoly

Lecture 8: Oligopoly and Game Theory

Lecture 9: Abatement Cost with Economic Choice

Lecture 10: Electricity Market Management: Norway vs. California

Lecture 11: General equilibrium, MERGE and final examination review

Recorded lectures are here

Special lectures by Göran Anderson on Power System Reinforcements and Auke Lont on the Next Generation Grid in Norway is posted here.

Models

• Small scale general equilibrium model in Excel
  
• Electricity dispatch model for NERC regions (GAMS/MCP)
  
• Activity analysis (GAMS/NLP)
• Coal market model (Excel, GAMS/MCP)
• Multi-regional input-output (Excel xls, xlsm and GAMS)
• Electricity dispatch model, and gnuplot interface
  
• Hotelling model and gnuplot interface
  
• You can find GNUPLOT downloads/information here and the most recent Windows version is here.
  
• CES demand workbook
• Oligopoly workbook -- you need to load the Solver add-in.
  

Links

James Fallows "Dirty Coal, Clean Future" from the Atlantic.

Vaclav Smil "Global Energy: The Latest Infatuations"

A bike shop keeper's perspective on the price elasticity of demand for oil and its substitutes.

IEA Energy Statistics Manual, IEA energy statistics time series data for Switzerland, country report for Switzerland -- 2003 and 2007 (password sive97), residential times series data for OECD and NOECD countries, Argentina.

Carbon sequestion: baby steps.

The End of Oil?  Think again.

On the cost of publicly funded insurance for nuclear reactors, Tom Cochran, a senior scientist in the nuclear program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, points out that the probability of a core melt had been estimated at about one chance in 10,000 reactor years of operation. "We've had now three core melts in 30 years in less than 500 reactors, he said, referring to Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and now Japan. "So the probability of a partial core melt is one chance in several hundred instead of one chance in 10,000. So, it's not a good statistic."

Dust-to-dust energy report comparing Prius and Hummer, with a rebuttals by Rocky Mountain Institute, Pacific Institute; and commentary in Slate Magazine.

McCloskey -- the Executive Summary and a review.

Suggestions from Reed College on citation style

Selected term papers from 2010

Jon Stewart on Energy Independence

Catherine Mohr on Embodied Energy and Green Building

Swiss Association of Energy Economists

A student chapter of the Swiss Association of Energy Economists has recently been founded at ETH.  Information is provided here.

Saxe

A Bug or a Feature?

Using Microsoft Internet Explore: If you want to use IE 7 with the course web page you need to configure your security settings:

1. Go to Tools and then Internet options.
2. Click on the advanced tab and scroll down to the security section.
3. Look for an option: warn about certificate address mismatch and uncheck that.

Now you will be able to access those sites without getting annoying warnings about certificates and so forth.