Bjarne Steffen

Energy-Sector Public-Policy Interventions

Motivated by the necessity to mitigate climate change, Bjarne Steffen’s research concerns public policy interventions to induce or accelerate technological change in the broader energy sector, using both modeling and empirical methods. Particularly, he is interested in the effect of climate and energy policies on the cost-competitiveness of emerging low-carbon technologies (e.g., renewables, electricity storage, e-mobility, direct air capture), and the role of the financial sector in re-allocating capital towards a low-carbon economy.

Mr. Steffen’s recent work deals with the international spillover of policy interventions for the decarbonization of road freight, the potential role of direct air capture technologies, and the effectiveness of green state investment banks in commercializing emerging renewable energy technologies. While at CESifo, he plans to advance his research on public versus private delivery of low-carbon infrastructure – aiming to understand the increasing role of government in the context of the low-carbon transition, and its ramifications for the economy at large.

Bjarne Steffen is Assistant Professor at ETH Zurich, and head of the Climate Finance and Policy Group (CFP) there. In his research, which is published in high-impact journals like PNAS, Nature Energy, or Nature Climate Change, he analyzes policies related to the low-carbon transition in the energy sector. To this end, he works at the intersection of energy and environmental economics, energy policy, and energy innovation studies. He is the PI of the ERC Starting Grant Project GREENFIN – Effective Green Financial Policies for the Low-Carbon Transition.

Before founding CFP, Mr. Steffen was a senior researcher and postdoc also at ETH Zurich; during 2019, he was a visiting scholar with at the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research. Before, he worked as Principal in the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) energy and infrastructure practices and was a project manager at the World Economic Forum. Mr. Steffen studied Economics at the University of Mannheim (also spending a year at the University of California at Berkeley) and holds a PhD in Energy Economics from the University of Duisburg-Essen.