Speaker: Professor Dr Rolf Wüstenhagen, Good Energies Professor for
Management of Renewable Energies and a Director of the
Institute for Economy and the Environment at the University of St.
Gallen (Switzerland).
Date: Wednesday, 7 September 2011
Time: 3:00pm to 5:00pm
Venue: ESI Conference
29 Heng Mui Keng Terrace
Block A #10-01
Singapore 259772
Please send us your name, organisation and email address via the ESI website here. For enquiries, please contact Ms. Jan Lui at 65162000.
Abstract
While investment into renewable forms of energy has seen steady growth over the last couple of years, it still falls short of the levels required to support the transition to a low-carbon global energy supply. The $243bn invested globally in the clean energy sector in 2010, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, is still a factor two below recent IPCC estimates of what would be needed to fully harvest the potential of renewable energy and contribute to climate change mitigation. This talk explores the role of bounded rationality and path dependence in explaining possible under-investment in renewable energies. Contrasting a range of corporate, private and public energy investment decisions with the central assumptions of textbook economics, we find evidence for status quo bias, social network effects and heuristic affect. The question arises whether investment decisions taken under these conditions deliver outcomes that optimize the risk-return ratio for society and for the investors themselves. Implications are discussed for public policies to overcome path dependence in renewable energy investment and for further research to adequately capture real-life energy decisions.
About the speaker
Rolf Wüstenhagen is the Good Energies Professor for Management of Renewable Energies and a Director of the Institute for Economy and the Environment at the University of St. Gallen (Switzerland). He has held visiting faculty positions at the University of British Columbia (2005) and Copenhagen Business School (2008), and was a member of the Swiss Federal Energy Research Commission (2004-2010). From 2008 to 2011, he served as one of the lead authors for the special report on renewable energy sources and climate change mitigation, published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in May 2011. Rolf’s research focuses on decision-making under uncertainty by energy investors, consumers and entrepreneurs and has been published in a variety of academic journals and other outlets. He embarked on an academic career after retiring from one of the leading European energy venture capital funds. From August 1 to September 8, 2011, Rolf is a visiting scholar at the National University of Singapore, jointly hosted by the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy (supported by the MacArthur Foundation) and the Energy Studies Institute (ESI). He can be contacted at: rolf.wuestenhagen@unisg.ch
This seminar will be held under Chatham House rules: “when a meeting, or part thereof, is held under the Chatham House Rule, participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other participant may be revealed.”
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