White certificate obligations impose energy savings targets on energy companies and allow them to trade energy savings certificates. They can be seen as a means of internalizing energy-use externalities and addressing energy efficiency market failures. This paper reviews existing evaluations of...

We investigate how moral hazard problems can cause sub-optimal investment in energy efficiency, a phenomenon known as the energy efficiency gap. We argue that such problems are likely to be important for home energy retrofits, where both the seller and the buyer can take hidden actions. The...

Although the building sector is recognized as having major potential for energy conservation and carbon dioxide emissions mitigation, conventional bottom-up and top-down models are limited in their ability to capture the complex economic and technological dynamics of the sector. This paper...

White certificate schemes mandate energy companies to promote energy efficiency with flexibility mechanisms, including the trading of energy savings. A unified framework is used to estimate the costs and benefits of the schemes implemented in Great Britain in 2002, in Italy in 2005 and in France...

White certificate schemes mandate energy companies to promote energy efficiency through flexibility mechanisms, including the trading of energy savings. They can be characterized as a quantity-based, baseline-and-credit system for the diffusion of energy efficient technologies. This paper offers...

Better leverage of public funding is essential in order to trigger the invest-ment needed for energy efficiency. In times of austerity governments in-creasingly look at policy instruments not funded by public expenditure and Energy Savings Obligations represent one option. Because Energy Savings...

In this paper, we discuss the results of a sensitivity analysis of Res-IRF, an energy-economy model of the demand for space heating in French dwellings. Res-IRF has been developed for the purpose of increasing behavioral detail in the modeling of energy demand. The different drivers of energy...

This paper assesses the impact of French policies for residential space-heating energy consumption, both enacted (tax credits for the purchase of energy efficient durables, soft loans for retrofitting actions, stringent building codes) and anticipated (carbon tax, retrofitting obligation). It...