MorganEnergy

Inevitably there will be days when no earthshaking story comes across our desks. Our plan is to fill at least some of those days with brief reviews of others places around the Internet where discussion of energy economics issues can be found. We would like to start with the EU Energy Policy Blog.

One reason for starting here is that EU Energy Policy is an actual blog, complete with RSS feeds, that you can follow the same way as you follow this blog. This is still quite rare, and we are delighted that someone else is making use of this technology.

The blog is run by Professor François Lévêque from the Ecole des mines de Paris. Some of the content could do with editing by for quality of English because it isn’t always clear what the author means, but the economics is generally very interesting. Despite the title, the content is not always EU-specific. Indeed, the site is publishing a series of extracts from Steven Stoft’s forthcoming book, Carbonomics. The latest extract, which deals with consumer reaction to high oil prices, is particularly interesting.

The most recent posts both deal with the questions of integrated European markets that we have mentioned recently. Jean-Michel Glachant argues that Europe’s electricity market needs an Independent System Operator, not just an Independent (or Legally unbundled) Transmission Operator, while Susanna Dorigoni and Federico Pontoni argue that removing vertical integration in Europe’s gas markets won’t necessarily result in competition, in part because, “the success in opening the networks to third parties depends upon the existence of third parties and the latter cannot exist if they are not granted access to new natural gas.”