欧州の化石依存クロスオーバー：損益分岐点、 affordability、投資転換点

Unofficial AI-generated summary based on the public title and abstract. Not an official translation.

🔬研究者:Provides a methodological framework for evaluating energy transition break-even points and affordability, useful for empirical studies.

🏢実務担当者:Offers concepts like Affordability-Frontier Efficiency to assess whether transition policies effectively include vulnerable households.

🏛政策担当者:Highlights the need for sequencing economic, financeability, and infrastructure conditions to avoid penalizing vulnerable groups during transition.

Version 3.0 of this record contains three linked methodological working papers examining the economic boundaries of European fossil dependence and the transition toward feasible lower-fossil alternatives. The Individual Losses Are Owned; The Concurrency Premium Is Not: Fossil Dependence, Compound Climate Stress and the Missing European Energy Ledger establishes the underlying accounting problem. It argues that conventional energy comparisons can capture individually attributable costs while failing to represent adequately the economic consequences of concurrent and interacting stresses across energy, climate, water, infrastructure and other systems. It develops the ledger logic needed to distinguish directly attributable losses from wider compound-system effects and asks how those effects should enter assessments of continued fossil dependence. The Crossover We Do Not Measure: A Break-Even Test for European Fossil Dependence converts that broader ledger into sectoral and pathway-specific break-even tests. Rather than asking whether fossil dependence is intrinsically “good” or “bad”, it asks a narrower empirical question: under what stated conditions does continued dependence on a particular fossil-dependent service cease to provide positive incremental economic value relative to a feasible lower-fossil alternative? The paper develops static and dynamic crossover measures intended to make that boundary measurable, falsifiable and sensitive to changing prices, infrastructure, technology and system conditions. The third paper, Cheaper to Run, Gated to Enter: The Affordability Frontier and Investment Turning Point of the European Energy Transition, extends the framework beyond conventional cost parity. A lower-fossil technology may become cheaper to operate before it becomes cheaper over its full economic life, and it may become cheaper over its full economic life before a household can finance entry. The paper therefore distinguishes five structural boundaries: the operating crossover, economic crossover, household affordability frontier, fossil investment crossover and system turning point. It further treats financeability and physical infrastructure as separate hard conditions on transition feasibility. The affordability framework formalises the household capital-access gap, interest-rate-sensitive financing constraints and the infrastructure gate. It defines a transition-ready condition in which a lower-fossil alternative must be economically favourable, financeable and physically accessible rather than merely cheaper on a total-cost basis. It also introduces Affordability-Frontier Efficiency as a policy metric for asking whether public intervention actually moves otherwise excluded households across the affordability frontier rather than subsidising households that could already make the transition. The distributional consequence becomes important where incumbent systems contain substantial fixed or quasi-fixed costs. Selective exit by households with capital can reduce the number of users over whom those costs are recovered. If the replacement system matures while vulnerable households remain unable to finance or physically access their own exit, transition can become cheaper for those able to leave while becoming more expensive, less convenient or less reliable for those who remain. The third paper therefore introduces a temporal policy test: vulnerable households should become transition-ready before the relevant incumbent system enters material structural decline. The framework then extends from household economics to incumbent investment. A fossil resource or infrastructure asset need not become physically exhausted before its economic case disappears. The investment crossover occurs when a prospective marginal fossil investment no longer earns the required return under expected future demand, price, operating-cost, policy and asset-life conditions. Existing low-cost production may remain profitable long after higher-cost new development ceases to clear that hurdle. The corresponding system turning point occurs when marginal infrastructure, replacement decisions and planning assumptions become persistently oriented toward the replacement system rather than extension of the incumbent. Taken together, the three papers form a sequential methodological argument: What does continued fossil dependence cost? When does retaining it cease to clear an economic break-even test? And who can actually reach the alternative once that crossover occurs? The resulting policy problem is therefore not simply one of technology cost or physical resource availability. It is also a problem of timing, access and system sequencing. Economic advantage, household financeability and enabling infrastructure must arrive in an order that allows vulnerable users to enter the replacement system before incumbent investment, infrastructure or service provision retreats sufficiently to impose material penalties on those left behind. All three papers are methodological and falsification-oriented. They do not claim that fossil dependence has already become economically negative in aggregate or within every sector; that electric vehicles, heat pumps, photovoltaic systems or other lower-fossil technologies are universally cheaper, suitable or affordable; or that European fossil systems have already entered structural decline. Their purpose is to define analytical boundaries, counterfactuals, empirical tests and stopping rules through which those propositions can be evaluated rather than assumed. Version 3.0 therefore develops a linked progression from system ledger, to economic crossover, to household access and investment turning point: Ledger → Break-even crossover → Affordability frontier → Investment crossover → System turning point. Ryder, J. F. (2026). Cheaper to Run, Gated to Enter: The Affordability Frontier and Investment Turning Point of the European Energy Transition. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21899672

• openalex https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21899672first seen 2026-09-02 04:47:31