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This paper studies the optimal transition from existing coal power plants to gas and renewable power under a carbon budget. It solves a model of polluting, exhaustible resources with capacity constraints and adjustment costs (to build coal, gas, and renewable power plants). It finds that optimal investment in renewable energy may start before coal power has been phased out and even before investment in gas has started, because doing so allows for smoothing investment over time and reduces adjustment costs. Gas plants may be used to reduce short-term investment in renewable power and associated costs, but must eventually be phased out to allow room for carbon-free power. One risk for myopic agents comparing gas and renewable investment is thus to overestimate the lifetime of gas plants-e.g., when computing the levelized cost of electricity-and be biased against renewable power. These analytical results are quantified with numerical simulations of the European Commission's 2050 energy roadmap.

Carbon Policy and Trading --- Climate Change Mitigation --- Climate Change Mitigation and Green House Gases --- Dynamic Efficiency --- Early-Scrapping --- Energy --- Energy and Environment --- Energy Production and Transportation --- Environment --- Environment and Energy Efficiency --- Investment --- Optimal Timing --- Path Dependence --- Resource Extraction

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This paper investigates the optimal timing of greenhouse gas abatement efforts in a multi-sectoral model with economic inertia, each sector having a limited abatement potential. It defines economic inertia as the conjunction of technical inertia - a social planner chooses investment on persistent abating activities, as opposed to choosing abatement at each time period independently - and increasing marginal investment costs in abating activities. It shows that in the presence of economic inertia, optimal abatement efforts (in dollars per ton) are bell-shaped and trigger a transition toward a low-carbon economy. The authors prove that optimal marginal abatement costs should differ across sectors: they depend on the global carbon price, but also on sector-specific shadow costs of the sectoral abatement potential. The paper discusses the impact of the convexity of abatement investment costs: more rigid sectors are represented with more convex cost functions and should invest more in early abatement. The conclusion is that overlapping mitigation policies should not be discarded based on the argument that they set different marginal costs ('"different carbon prices"') in different sectors.

Climate Change Economics --- Climate change mitigation --- Climate Change Mitigation and Green House Gases --- Energy and Environment --- Environment --- Environment and Energy Efficiency --- How-flexibility --- Inertia --- Optimal policies --- Optimal timing --- Overlapping policies --- Sectoral policies --- Transport Economics Policy & Planning --- When-flexibility