Wind energy is one of the renewable energy sources that has been touted to address the challenges of energy security and environmental degradation. This is only attainable if countries with substantial wind energy potential use it in significant proportion to satisfy their energy needs. One promising sector where wind energy can be employed to actualize this potential is the electricity sector. However, the current reality is that fossil fuels still dominate the energy profiles of most economies of the world, including the advanced economies, with wind renewable energy source accounting for a very small proportion of the energy mix. Germany is one of the few countries that offers promising opportunities in deploying wind energy to its full potentials. This study therefore explores the feasibility of substituting wind energy for nuclear energy and other fossil fuels using Germany as a country of focus. We use the ridge regression procedure to analyse yearly time series data for the German power sector that spans the period 1986 to 2018. With respect to output elasticities of the energy inputs, the results reveal that wind and natural gas have positive output elasticity estimates while the estimates for nuclear and coal are negative. We also found that all the inputs pairs have positive substitution elasticity estimates between them. With respect to wind energy, the highest substitutability estimate occurred with nuclear power which is followed by natural gas and then coal. The study recommended that policies such as granting of tax credit for wind energy technology, reduction in property taxes for wind power facilities, and allocation of fund for research and development (R&D) in wind energy technology are recommended to promote the use of wind energy in the economy.
Environmental degradation remains a huge obstacle to sustainable development. Research on the factors that promote or degrade the environment has been extensively conducted. However, one important variable that has conspicuously received very limited attention is energy innovations. To address this gap in the literature, this study investigated the effects of energy innovations on environmental quality in the U.S. for the period 1974 to 2016. We have incorporated GDP and immigration as additional regressors. Three indices comprising of CO2 emissions, ecological footprint and carbon footprint were used to proxy environmental degradation. The cointegration tests established long-run relationships between the variables. Using a maximum likelihood approach with a break, the results showed evidence that energy innovations significantly improve environmental quality while GDP degrades the quality of the environment, and immigration has no significant effect on the environment. Policy implications of the results are discussed in the body of the manuscript.
The energy profile of India is dominated by fossil fuels, which create concerns over resource and environmental sustainability as fossil fuels are non-renewable and high carbon emitting. This scenario has necessitated the call for more renewables to replace fossil fuels to address resource and environmental sustainability concerns. This study, therefore, investigates the possibility of switching the fossil fuels of oil, coal, and natural gas for renewable energy in India. Using annual Indian data spanning more than four decades, a transcendental logarithmic production function based on a second-order Taylor Series approximation is estimated with the ridge regression technique. To achieve robustness, two equations with gross domestic product and adjusted net savings as regressands are estimated to proxy economic growth and sustainable development, respectively. The empirical results show substantial substitution possibilities between the fuels for both gross domestic product and adjusted net savings equations. The empirical findings show that India has the capacity to satisfy its energy needs through renewables to pursue not only economic growth but sustainable development. To actualize this potential, the Indian government should promote investment in renewables as this also promotes economic growth and development.
The primary objective of this paper is to investigate the isolated impacts of hydroelectricity consumption on the environment in Malaysia as an emerging economy. We use four different measures of environmental degradation including ecological footprint, carbon footprint, water footprint and CO2 emission as target variables, while controlling for GDP, GDP square and urbanization for the period 1971 to 2016. A recently introduced unit root test with breaks is utilized to examine the stationarity of the series and the bounds testing approach to cointegration is used to probe the long run relationships between the variables. VECM Granger causality technique is employed to examine the long-run causal dynamics between the variables. Sensitivity analysis is conducted by further including fossil fuels in the equations. The results show evidence of an inverted U-shaped relationship between environmental degradation and real GDP. Hydroelectricity is found to significantly reduce environmental degradation while urbanization is also not particularly harmful on the environment apart from its effect on air pollution. The VECM Granger causality results show evidence of unidirectional causality running from hydroelectricity and fossil fuels consumption to all measures of environmental degradation and real GDP per capita. There is evidence of feedback hypothesis between real GDP to all environmental degradation indices. The inclusion of fossil fuel did not change the behavior of hydroelectricity on the environment but fossil fuels significantly increase water footprint.
The main objective of this paper is to estimate the interfuel substitution elasticities between hydropower and the fossil fuels of coal and natural gas used in the generation of electricity for Malaysia. Due to the violation of the assumption behind the ordinary least squares (OLS) method on account of the correlated error terms in the system of equations, the econometrics techniques of seemingly unrelated regression (SUR) was adopted to obtain the parameter estimates using dataset that covers the period 1988 to 2016. The main finding is that there exists substantial substitution possibility between hydropower and fossil fuels in the generation of electricity for Malaysia. CO2 emissions mitigation scenarios were also conducted to explore the possible effects of substituting fossil fuels for hydropower to generate electricity. The results show that switching from high carbon-emitting fuels to renewable energy such as hydropower will substantially reduce CO2 emission and assist the country towards achieving the carbon emissions reduction targets. Policy recommendations are offered in the body of the manuscript.
This paper deals with the analysis of mean reversion and convergence of the ecological footprint (EF) in the MENA region. Using a long memory model based on fractional integration, we find that the results are very heterogeneous across countries depending on the assumptions made on the error term and the use of original versus logged data. Nevertheless, some conclusions can be obtained. Thus, mean reversion is decisively found in the case of Tunisia, and other countries showing some degree of reversion to the mean include Israel, Syria, Yemen, and Iran. Dealing with the issue of convergence within the MENA countries, similar conclusions hold and only Tunisia reports statistical evidence of convergence for the two types of errors. Additional evidence is found in the case of Syria, Yemen, and Jordan with uncorrelated errors and for Iran with autocorrelation. It is recommended that environmental policies targeted at stabilizing the trends in EF in the MENA region should not be indiscriminately applied in consideration of the heterogeneous nature of the series in the region.