Environment and Resources

Research Focus

Environmental and Energy Policy

Following the German industry’s voluntary commitment to protect the climate more than a decade ago, the research division has acted as a scientific evaluator of its efforts. On the basis of annual reports, the project CO2 monitoring assesses the progress made by the participating industry sectors towards their individual goals. This project has been recognized by the European Commission as prerequisite for the approval of the exemptions of Germany’s energy-intensive industry from the eco-tax.

RWI has furthermore evolved as one of the leading institutions for evidence-based evaluation of development measures. The focus is on the relation between poverty and improved access to energy for households and small enterprises in developing countries. Together with Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ) and World Bank, RWI is working on a study investigating energy usage in micro-enterprises and its impact on firm performance in rural Africa. In this context the research division evaluated several electrification projects providing yet non-electrified rural areas with electricity. In addition, the research division is continually examining the impact of more efficient cooking stoves in Senegal. In Africa, most households rely on woodfuels for cooking purposes with all the related negative effects on health and energy expenditures. Furthermore the research division is evaluating the Dutch development cooperation in the energy sector. The Netherlands are the most important bilateral donor in this area. Again, the work concentrates on cooking energy and electricity supply.

All these activities are characterized by a comprehensive evaluation approach, covering survey design, data collection and analysis, as well as reporting and the formulation of practitioner-oriented recommendations. At the same time, the research division provides hands-on consultancy to projects in Africa, thereby maintaining close contact to applied development work on the ground.

Environmental, Energy and Resource Economics

Almost four decades after the oil price crises, there is still no generally acknowledged and widely used statistical indicator to measure the energy supply risk of an import country like Germany. In several projects and publications, the research division has developed a supply risk indicator so that the supply risk of a country can be quantified in a single number. The concept was inter alia included in the Hessian catalogue of sustainability indicators and was applied in the project “Energy Forecast 2009”, the most prominent national project in energy economics.

One recurring subject of research is the energy consumption of private households, recently dealt with in the “Energy Forecast 2009”. Starting with the survey data collected for the years 2003 and 2005, the resulting panel data set was subsequently used in various national and international publications, e.g. to measure improvements of energy efficiency through Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) methods.

RWI and the survey institute forsa are now again jointly commissioned to analyze the energy consumption of private households for the time period 2006-2010. Together with the existing panel data and those now being acquired through the repeated survey of about 8 000 households, there will be unique foundation for microeconometric analyses of the energy consumption of private households in Germany. For instance, this data base will be explored in a project to investigate the rebound effect due to energy efficiency improvements.

RWI is also engaged in SFB 823 “Statistics of non-linear dynamic processes”, which is financed by the German Research Foundation (DFG). Building on the example of electricity production in Germany, Project A3, “Dynamic modeling of production technologies”, develops models to reflect production technologies that adequately account for time-varying production capacities, outputs, and states of technology. To this end, both extensions of and alternatives to traditional approaches are considered. Specifically, to investigate the long-run impacts of investment decisions on the choice among diverse electricity production technologies, discrete choice methods are employed and combined with models that reflect the short-run response to fuel price changes in electricity generation.