Research at the Chair of Energy Economics

The Chair of Energy Economics carries out both, fundamental and applied research projects together with national and international academic as well as industrial partners. A main focus is on the model-based techno-economic analysis of the European and German energy system and their developments (especially with regard to the electricity and gas market).

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Einblick in unsere Forschungsgebiete

Research fields and models

The Chair of Energy Economics researches systemic aspects of energy supply. The focus is on the further development of different models and their application in the fields of power plant dispatch, intergration of reneable energies, transmission and distribution grids, nationals and international markets for electricity and gas as well as political and regulatroy aspects. The quantitative reserach is conducted mainly based on the electricity market model ELTRAMOD, the electricity grid model ELMOD and the gas market model GAMAMOD.

Current projects

The Chair of Energy Economics takes in part in amultitude of national and international research and industry projects. Together with national and international partners in research and industry, current challenges in the field of energy economics are addressed - both method- and spplication-oriented.

Series of the Chair

Beside publications in scientific journals, proceedings of conferences and professional journal, the chair also publishes the Series of the of Chair of Energy Economics. This series contains completed PhD thesis as well as important project results.

Research

Global changes in the energy industry framework are resulting in new structures on energy markets. Particularly the diverse, sometimes contrary, requirements in respect of climate protection, energy supply and cost-efficiency illustrate that securing a correspondingly more sustainable energy supply is one of the greatest global challenges of the future. Pioneering interdisciplinary studies can pave the way for a resource-friendly, efficient and secure energy supply. Energy industry issues to be solved appear along the entire energy value chain - from energy provision to energy transport and energy distribution through to energy demand. The entire range of technological options should be taken into account here, especially as questions about a sustainable energy supply are not only being asked in industrialized nations, but also in emerging and developing countries with, in part, completely different requirements.

The objective of the research work is to develop new methodological approaches in the energy area, which can model the structure and changing energy and environmental policy framework of the energy systems. Not only business management approaches, but also insights from other disciplines such as economics and engineering are being taken into account in teaching and research. With these methods, techn0-economic issues are being addressed at very different levels of abstraction, from local areas such as industrial enterprises to urban energy systems and supply areas of energy supply companies through to international energy systems.

The focus of the work is on the model-aided analysis of European electricity, gas and emissions trading markets. In this respect, the sub-department has an expensive set of tools for answering energy industry and policy questions.
ELMOD is a European energy market model that represents energy conversion plants and transmission networks. The model has been developed with a view to investigating various issues in relation to investment decisions, bottlenecks in the transmission network and market design, focusing on Germany and Continental Europe. ELMOD is a bottom-up energy market model: the target function is welfare maximization, taking technological and ecological restrictions into account. The model maps the electricity market with an hourly resolution. The basic version has been published in a working paper (WP-EM-00).