External Environmental Costs of Electric Power: Analysis and Internalization

Quantified and monetized environmental costs of energy have been receiving substantial attention since 1988. The pressing environmental problems from acid rain through global warming to nuclear accidents have lead to an increasing willingness to include such costs in energy planning and pricing. The book, reporting on the first international workshop on this matter, gives a comprehensive picture of the latest research in the filed and the different approaches to the practical implementation of these results.

Environmental costs of electric power generation are receiving increasing attention as an important input to planning and decision processes. Since the outstart of the discussion on the monetized environmental costs of electricity in 1988 a number of studies have been conducted on the subject, producing partially contradictory results. Simultaneously political action has resulted from the first stage on this discussion process. In Germany the higher rates which have to be payed to autoproducers based on renewable energy sources have been explicitly justified by the existence of external environmental costs of conventional electricity generation. At the same time some state regulatory commissions in the United States have introduced adders for environmental costs in the utility planning process. This book reports on the first international workshop on the subject, bringing together practically all experts in the field of research and political implementation from the United States and Germany, the two pioneering countries. The more than thirty contributed papers contained in this volume give the most comprehensive and up-to-date overview of the field. Some papers already outline the future course of research by giving an overview over some major research projects, which have just started.