No abstract

The Paris Agreement for a post-2020 international framework for tackling climate change was adopted in December 2015. The agreement requires that each country prepares and communicates nationally determined contributions (NDCs) every 5 years, including greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reduction targets. Most countries submitted NDCs before the Paris Agreement. According to our analyses using a global energy and GHG emission reduction assessment model, the emission reduction costs of the NDCs vary widely among countries; and those differences will induce carbon leakage, thus the expected global emission reduction is smaller than that predicted by simply aggregating the emission reductions of all the countries. Moreover, the emissions are larger than those required for the pathways leading to a high probability of temperature stabilization at below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels. To fill the gap, a rigorous review process employing robust indicators measuring emission reduction efforts is crucial. However, the development and deployment of innovative technologies with cheaper costs is even more significant.

In a context of electricity market liberalization in Europe, this paper addresses the issue of investment in electricity generation capacities using a historical approach. Our purpose is to identify past drivers for investors' decisions on the European electricity market, regarding investments in power generation capacities, and understand how they evolved. We focus on France, in comparison with Germany, United Kingdom, Spain and Italy. The considered period ranges from 1945 up to now. The analysis focuses on two major processes: the constitution of the generation mix (past investment choices), and the European market liberalization (economic context for today's investors). Major economic theories of the time are confronted to the decisions that were made, analyzing the existence of a gap between rational behavior described by the theory and actual behaviors of investors. In the end, the drivers identified as key are state policy, availability of the resource or technology, and market structure. Index Terms-State Policies, Monopoly and Liberalization Theories, History of European Electricity Market. I HHI definition, with Si the market share of firm i in the market, and N the number of firms: N H=L,s; i=lThe more HHI is low, the less the market is concentrated, and the more HHI is high, the more the market is concentrated.

While nuclear power may experience a technological breakthrough in Europe with Generation IV nuclear reactors within a few decades (2040), several events and drivers could question this possibility, e.g. the Fukushima accident, climate issues and liberalization of the electricity market.This article analyzes how the conditions necessary for their industrial development from now up to 2040 can be either favorable or detrimental to future nuclear reactors compared with other technologies and according to four main investment drivers: 1) technical change, 2) policy, 3) market, and 4) power company drivers.Twenty-four scenarios have been identified through structural analysis, with only three proving to be favorable to the development of future nuclear reactors.