The Microeconomics of Clean Energy Technologies

Catalog description

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.