Energy technologies are unusual economic goods: they are capital intensive, infrastructure dependent, politically salient, and deeply embedded in market rules. Understanding why some clean technologies scale rapidly (solar PV, batteries) while others struggle (nuclear, CCS, hydrogen) requires tools from microeconomics, industrial organization, and innovation economics. This course provides graduate students with a rigorous, applied microeconomic framework for analyzing clean energy technologies and markets. The course emphasizes how firms, investors, and consumers respond to incentives, risks, market design, and institutional constraints. Students will develop the ability to diagnose market failures, such as risk mispricing, coordination problems, missing markets, credibility issues, and non-price constraints that shape technology adoption and investment outcomes. The course will use structured case analysis and moderated “Market Failures Clinics,” to delve into the microeconomic foundations necessary to understand how clean energy markets function in practice—including with guest practitioners—and why policy intervention is sometimes required.
The energy transition presents a career-defining challenge in many disciplines and professions. Because of the breadth of this challenge, the very expertise across sectors needed to achieve the transition can present barriers to collaboration and progress. This course will prototype an effort to better understand these barriers in the classroom in ways that might overcome them in practice. Both instructors and students are drawn from technology and policy disciplines and a seminar format will emphasize discussion across these backgrounds.
The course uses case studies of grand challenges in the energy transition to identify repeatable, process- oriented best practices for solving complex, systemic problems. This course is intended for graduate students with a background in social sciences and humanities (economics, political science, law, planning, design, etc.) and students with a background in STEM programs (science and engineering).
Energy technologies are unusual economic goods: they are capital intensive, infrastructure dependent, politically salient, and deeply embedded in market rules. Understanding why some clean technologies scale rapidly (solar PV, batteries) while others struggle (nuclear, CCS, hydrogen) requires tools from microeconomics, industrial organization, and innovation economics. This course provides graduate students with a rigorous, applied microeconomic framework for analyzing clean energy technologies and markets. The course emphasizes how firms, investors, and consumers respond to incentives, risks, market design, and institutional constraints. Students will develop the ability to diagnose market failures, such as risk mispricing, coordination problems, missing markets, credibility issues, and non-price constraints that shape technology adoption and investment outcomes. The course will use structured case analysis and moderated “Market Failures Clinics,” to delve into the microeconomic foundations necessary to understand how clean energy markets function in practice—including with guest practitioners—and why policy intervention is sometimes required.
This new collaborative course — co-taught by faculty from the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy, Weitzman School of Design and School of Engineering and Applied Science — uses societal grand challenges as scenarios for identifying repeatable, process-oriented best practices for solving complex, systemic problems in the energy transition. This course is intended for Graduateuate students with a background in either the social sciences (economics, political science, law, or policy) or who are in STEM programs (science and engineering). This course will complement the material covered in the Kleinman Center Introduction to Energy Policy course (ENMG 5020) taught in the fall. It will be an opportunity to learn from one another and build a holistic understanding of the technical and policy dimensions of the energy transition and the global response to climate change and environmental deGraduateation. The course will be broken into three chapters. For the first third of the semester, we will focus on basics of policy and engineering literacy, with each student bringing their own expertise to the table. The best way to truly understand a topic is to teach it, and this chapter of the course will focus on learning how to talk across disciplines and approach challenges in new and unfamiliar ways. The middle third of this course will be built around case studies of grand societal challenges; some of which have seen considerable progress towards being solved, others which are still the subject of great uncertainty and disagreement. Among other topics, this course will explore: The impact of sweeping standards on building and appliance efficiency; the rapid development and mutual reinforcement of renewable energy technologies and policy; the ability of policy to facilitate healthy competition between technologies (hydrogen vs batteries, for example); The allocation of scarce CCUS resources to abate difficult to decarbonize products like cement, steel, and plastics; the importance of grid regulation and market design in ensuring future energy reliability and affordability; and the need for transition-ready environmental policies that protect ecosystems and communities without hindering access to critical resources (metals, minerals, land, etc.) The final third of the semester will be structured largely around group projects for which students with diverse expertise will work together to identify a grand societal challenge and isolate the technical and policy barriers to solving this challenge. These groups will give regular updates to the rest of the class and will work towards making a meaningful contribution to solving their challenge through collaborative problem solving, design, and research. This course will deliver content learning outcomes about technical, societal, and policy aspects of focal grand challenges, while providing all participants (including instructors) experience and skills to address community-derived problems in teams composed of members from disciplines that rarely collaborate. Over time, this course will serve as a working, iterative “laboratory” on parameters that affect the success of convergence style research and problem solving.
This seminar will explore a collection of ideas influencing energy policy development in the U.S. and around the world. Our platform for this exploration will be seven recent books to be discussed during the semester. These books each contribute important insights to seven ideas that influence energy policy: Narrative, Transition, Measurement, Systems, Subsidiarity, Disruption, Attachment. Books for 2018 will be chosen over the summer; the 2017 books are listed here as examples: Policy Paradox (2011) by Stone, Climate Shock (2015) by Wagner and Weitzman, Power Density (2015) by Smil, Connectography (2016) by Khanna, Climate of Hope (2017) by Bloomberg and Pope, Utility of the Future (2016) by MIT Energy Initiative, Retreat from a Rising Sea (2016) by Pilkey, Pilkey-Jarvis, Pilkey.
This course provides an advanced introduction to the design and delivery of energy policy at various levels of government in the U.S. and beyond. Energy presents theoretical and practical challenges across many disciplines and professions, especially in the context of economic development and environmental sustainability at scales ranging from local to global. This course is intended to provide a broad overview of the institutions, legal frameworks, technologies, and markets involved in energy policy by exploring theories and case studies across these topics, with an emphasis on the energy transition necessitated by climate change. That said, a full introduction to energy policy requires multiple courses and Penn offers many salient ones across several schools including Law, Wharton, Weitzman, SAS, and SEAS. The primary goal of this course is to teach students how to think—rather than what to know—about energy policy. As such, this course provides both (a) a foundation for students who want to take additional courses on energy law, markets, technology, or policy and (b) a synthesis for students who have taken such courses and want to connect ideas and issues across disciplines and professions. Our seminar sessions will be largely discussion and exercise based to allow students to develop skills as energy policy analysts and to collectively theorize connections between laws, institutions, policy design, and outcomes.
The Russian Federation’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has fundamentally altered post-Cold War security norms across the European continent. This includes a reinvigorated Transatlantic approach to supporting European energy security. For example, Western Europe had for years built up a strategic security vulnerability through an over-reliance on Russian hydrocarbon resources, in particular natural gas, as well as critical infrastructure owned by Kremlin-controlled enterprises. Europe is now embarking on a transformational shift to end its longstanding dependence on Russian hydrocarbons that provides an opportunity to both decouple from an authoritarian neighbor and decarbonize its energy supply to address the climate crisis. Meanwhile, policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic have aimed to deprive the Russian government of the financial and technical means of prosecuting its military aggression in Ukraine through comprehensive sanctions and technology export control regimes. This course will explore the history of European dependence on Russian energy resources and critical infrastructure projects and will analyze how the Russian Federation has ‘weaponized energy’ against European democracies before and after it’s invasion of Ukraine, including through trends of strategic corruption and elite capture. The course will assess as a case study the current European energy infrastructure landscape and ask students to propose infrastructure, regulatory, and physical/cyber security strategies from the perspective of a practitioner of transatlantic energy diplomacy. This course will also explore contemporary trends in energy sanctions and technology export controls policies crafted by democratic states worldwide. We will review recent U.S. and European sanctions policies through the framework of existing and proposed Russia sanctions, including analysis of sanctions implemented through Executive Order and Congressional legislation, and similar legislation enacted by the European Union. The course will take a multidisciplinary approach, combining primary source readings with classroom simulations drawing on the historical, policy, science, and technology drivers of effective European energy security strategies.
This seminar will explore a collection of ideas influencing energy policy development in the U.S. and around the world. Our platform for this exploration will be seven recent books to be discussed during the semester. These books each contribute important insights to seven ideas that influence energy policy: Narrative, Transition, Measurement, Systems, Subsidiarity, Disruption, Attachmen
“Energy issues are among some of the most important and complex issues facing the modern world. Energypractices are related intimately to climate change, national security, air and water pollution, economic stability of nations, social inequality, and poverty. This seminar-style course takes an in-depth view at the issues surrounding energy, and both the policy approaches used across the world to address such issues and the justice and equity dimensions of energy systems. Of importance to the discussions in this course is not simply a consideration of which policies have been adopted and to what ends, but rather a comprehensive evaluation of the political environment in which policies are designed and implemented, the manner in which governments can redesign their approaches to energy, and how an energy justice approach has the potential to fundamentally redesign our energy systems. This year, we will also focus quite a bit on the intersections between energy inequalities and racial inequalities, with an objective to elucidate such intersections for the energy-curious public.”
Why is it so hard to stop emitting the greenhouse gases that cause climate change and threaten to upend the planet’s environment? An answer is that since the production and use of energy forms the backbone of the modern economy, we fear that changing our current energy systems will have negative economic outcomes. Fossil fuel energy systems enabled the Industrial Revolution and have led to vastly improved living standards. Doing all the things we need to do to address emissions – building up new systems for generating power and transportation, new production methods for heavy industry and agriculture, and new ways of building design and land use – will require shifting to relatively novel technologies, creating uncertainties about the implications for energy prices, as well as bigger questions around the path forward for economic growth, global competitiveness, and the availability of good jobs. This course will examine energy policy from the perspective of an economic policymaker, asking what do we know about how to foster a clean energy system with low or no greenhouse gas emissions while also delivering strong, stable, shared economic growth? This course will begin by laying out the role that energy systems have played in powering economic development; we will then move on to assess what parts of the economy might be at risk when shifting away from current energy systems to new, clean energy technologies; and the last third of the course will identify the implications for economic policymaking.