TESTING FOR THE PRESENCE OF SOME FEATURES OF INCREASING RETURNS TO ADOPTION FACTORS IN ENERGY SYSTEM DYNAMICS AN ANALYSIS VIA THE LEARNING CURVE APPROACH

摘要

Environmental policy debates increasingly focus on issues related to the energy system dynamics. This is largely due to production and consumption processes based on fossil fuel resources, mainly oil and coal, which have prompted serious harmful effects on the environment and the ecosystem equilibrium. The most famous example is the current problem of climate change caused by continuous and intensive conventional energy technologies’ use. Subsequently, one of the major challenges of the international community is to shift from a conventional energy-based economic system to an environmentally friendly-based economic system. However, the environmentally friendly technologies are associated with a techno-economic system that is radically different from the conventional one in terms of structure, density, needed investment and regulatory practices. Therefore, the transition process which starts by the development and then the deployment of renewable energy innovations, goes behind the simple substitution of energy technologies’ use and basically corresponds to a change in the path and direction of technological change regime. Until now, the technological transition process supposed to have started a few decades ago, is still incomplete and shows some serious hitches related especially to the low competitiveness of the renewable energy technologies and to the established market structure. Indeed, the actual energy system is locked-in conventional fossil fuel resources which benefit from important increasing returns to adoption (IRA) factors, i.e. learning effects, scale effects, network externalities, increasing returns of information and technological interdependencies (Arthur, 1987, 1988a, 1988b, 1989) and the technological regime shift to renewable energy sources faces large systemic barriers. It is, thus, of interest to enhance our understanding of the factors which explain the lock-in situation in order to promote the technological regime transition and create favourable conditions for path-breaking.