Browsing by Subject "Energy policy"

There are currently 22 states with full or partial disclosure requirements for their electricity suppliers. These requirements differ significantly across states, in terms of the specific information content, structure, and presentation, but all have the potential of increasing customers' awareness about the links between their electricity consumption and air emissions, and perhaps create incentives for utilities to reduce those emissions or for customers to reduce their consumption or to switch to a different electricity supplier.

How effective this policy has been is still unclear. The main criterion for effective communication strategies is that they include relevant information for the readers in a usable form. Information needs as well as the ability to process and apply it vary significantly across individuals. However, people are limited in their information-processing capabilities. Policy makers therefore face the trade-off between a large amount of potentially relevant information that ideally needs to be included on the label on the one hand, and decrease in usability as more information is included on the label, on the other.

This paper examines the design, readability and usability of sample labels from 18 different states with information disclosure requirements. The labels are compared and rated according to how they balance the two main dimensions of label design, information content and usability, demonstrating the difficult trade-off between the two. In addition to this, the labels are analyzed along several key aspects: information load, focus on environmental impact, comparability, understandability, and materiality of information. As part of the analysis, measures for these different aspects of label effectiveness are created. The main finding of the analysis is that there are difficult trade-offs between information content and label usability. However, this trade-off can partially be avoided by carefully designing the labels, easing the cognitive burden of users while still conveying relevant information to the decision maker.

The results of the analysis can help evaluate the various existing disclosure policies, and offer approaches to improve upon them. It will also be shown that while preferred levels of information content are incommensurate with maximum usability, certain structures and form elements succeed at making more complex information content easier to use, improving the overall performance of the labels.

“In Search of Friendship” attempts to set straight the confounding record on Russian oil in the twentieth century. Engaging a rich literature centered on questions of national energy dependency, a broad term denoting fraught reliance on potentially scarce fuel supplies, the dissertation poses alternative questions of energy transition, or changes in the state of a given energy system. These questions include the following: Why did the Soviet government neglect its oil industry for more than two decades after coming to power? How did that same government then manage to transform its oil industry into a global leader within less than a decade during the Cold War? And how did it manage to mobilize the material resources, political will, and technical know-how to build the world’s longest oil pipeline, which they named “Druzhba,” the Russian word for friendship? Traditionally, scholars have answered these questions by arguing that the Soviet government repurposed tried-and-true tools of central economic planning as circumstances demanded, changing its underlying economic system little in the process. Applying a business history approach, “In Search of Friendship” counters this narrative by bringing the socialist firm to the center of its analysis to create a narrative of dynamic if ultimately unsuccessful change and innovation. In short, it supplant a story of what one historian has called “history’s cruel tricks” with another story of “best laid plans gone awry.” In the process, it draws heavily on material from more than a dozen historical repositories in Russia, including the State Archive of the Russian Federation, the Russian State Archive of the Economy, and the National Archive of the Republic of Tatarstan.

The principle purpose of this study is to explore the significance of the concept of multilateral energy cooperation in the Northeast Asia.Northeast Asia is a region with increasing importance in terms of the world energy balance.Nonetheless, various political conflicts and embedded historical distrusts among these nations hinder any form of institutional cooperation framework. This paper argues that the nations in Northeast Asia must establish a new form of institutional vehicle with supranational characteristics in order to achieve effective and practical energy cooperation in this region. This analysis will provide a better understanding of how the Northeast Asian countries can establish a new form of an energy cooperative organization in the region.