Evaluatie van de noodzaak en het ontwerp van industrieel decarbonisatiebeleid naast emissiehandel

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🔬研究者:Provides a rigorous analysis of investment barriers and policy interactions in industrial decarbonization, offering a framework for further research.

🏢実務担当者:Highlights how carbon price uncertainty and other risks affect investment decisions, and how support schemes can mitigate these risks.

🏛政策担当者:Offers evidence on the limitations of carbon pricing alone and design principles for complementary instruments like carbon contracts for difference and hydrogen support.

This thesis examines the need for, and design of, industrial decarbonisation policy beyond carbon pricing in the context of the European Union's climate objectives. While carbon pricing is regarded as the central instrument for cost-effective emissions reduction, its ability to induce timely and efficient abatement in energy-intensive industrial sectors in isolation is widely considered insufficient. Industry is characterised by long-lived capital-intensive assets, irreversible investment decisions, and exposure to multiple sources of uncertainty, all of which can limit firms' responsiveness to price signals alone. Against that background, this thesis contributes to the body of literature on why carbon pricing may be insufficient to deliver deep industrial decarbonisation, and explores how complementary policy instruments interact with market design and system dynamics. The first set of findings highlights the limitations of carbon pricing as a stand-alone instrument for industrial decarbonisation. Even in the presence of an economy-wide emissions trading scheme, investments in low-carbon industrial technologies may be delayed or foregone when firms face binding financial constraints, limited planning horizons, or volatile and uncertain future carbon prices. These frictions weaken the intertemporal coordination of investments that carbon pricing is intended to provide and can result in emissions reductions being postponed rather than avoided. The analysis further shows sector-specific characteristics on firms' responses to price signals. The second part of the thesis examines complementary policy instruments that aim to address barriers not directly resolved by carbon pricing. Particular attention is given to carbon contracts for difference as a mechanism to reduce carbon price risk for low-carbon investments, as they are high on the current political agenda. The results show that such contracts can stabilise expected abatement revenues and thereby influence investment timing and technology choice. At the same time, carbon price risk is only one among several relevant sources of uncertainty. Exposure to operational cost risk, and future policy changes remains, limiting the effectiveness of support schemes that focus narrowly on carbon price differentials. The analysis therefore emphasises that the performance of carbon contracts for difference depends critically on their design and on the broader policy and market context in which they operate. The thesis then investigates technology-specific support schemes directed at green hydrogen. It shows that policies targeting hydrogen production and use can influence investment incentives and market outcomes beyond their immediate sectoral scope, due to interactions with electricity markets and emissions trading systems. These interactions suggest that technology-specific support, while targeted at a specific market failure, does not operate in isolation but alters incentives across related markets, with spillover effects that can partially address or exacerbate other inefficiencies and affect overall system performance. Overall, the thesis contributes to a more nuanced understanding of why carbon pricing alone may fall short in driving industrial decarbonisation and how complementary instruments can be assessed under real-world constraints. It clarifies the mechanisms and conditions that shape investment behaviour and system outcomes, thereby informing the design and evaluation of industrial climate policy in real-world second-best settings.

• openalex https://lirias.kuleuven.be/handle/20.500.12942/784725first seen 2026-05-05 19:11:30