Energy Economics

We review the last four episodes of Energy Economics, but we still find that people expect things for nothing, and have no idea that if you don't earn money, you don't have it to spend. It is a basic fact of disposable income, but time and time again we are asked to do things free of charge. Recently, we launched the energy strategy in the Scottish Parliament, and so are firmly in control of the direction the energy market will take, as we negotiate our way through matters such as the Banniskirk development in the North of Scotland.So, we start to look at how the environment is valued in economic terms.

We start to look at other fundamentals of economics, demand and supply, valuation methods, time = money principle, which is not well understood. Many voluntary organisations do not actually have income, but still have salaries, they have no supporting products, unless they also contract themselves out for an income, and they can choose to give a percentage of it to the charity they work for. The regulations of the Charities Commission for England and Wales, the Charities Commission for Northern Ireland and the Office of the Scottish Charities Regulators are responsible for monitoring the charitable sector, and setting out the rules. There are other business models, which will not go into here, but they have been covered recently in a programme with London South Bank University and the structure of the Councils, which are funded by central Government, by the Local Climate Academy.We will, however, focus on the economics, and not business structure. Much of the public sector structure is in the book Green Advisor, The Teacher's Manual.

In Unit 2 of this course, we look at the fundamentals of economics, land, labour and capital and the interaction through communication. We relate this to the energy sector.