Navigating the energy trilemma during geopolitical and environmental crises

Richard Tol

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: There are many indicators of energy security. Few measure what really matters -- affordable and reliable energy supply -- and the trade-offs between the two. Reliability is physical, affordability is economic. Russia's latest invasion of Ukraine highlights some of the problems with energy security, from long-term contracts being broken to supposedly secure supplies being diverted to retired power plants being recommissioned to spillovers to other markets. The transition to carbon-free energy poses new challenges for energy security, from a shift in dependence from some resources (coal, oil, gas) to others (rare earths, wind, sunshine) to substantial redundancies in the energy capital stock to undercapitalized energy companies, while regulatory uncertainty deters investment. Renewables improve energy security in one dimension, but worsen it in others, particularly long spells of little wind. Security problems with rare earths and borrowed capital are less pronounced, as stock rather than flow.

Date: 2023-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cis, nep-ene, nep-env and nep-tra
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://arxiv.org/pdf/2301.07671 Latest version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:arx:papers:2301.07671

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers from arXiv.org
Bibliographic data for series maintained by arXiv administrators ().