Three Essays on Energy Transition: Challenges, Impacts and Policies Perspectives

This thesis has been developed within the broader doctoral research topic of the economic impacts of the energy transition. The underlying premise is that the energy transition cannot be understood merely as a technological substitution between fossil fuels and renewable energy sources, nor only as an environmental policy aimed at reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. It is a structural economic transformation that affects how energy is produced, distributed and consumed; changes the behaviour of households, firms and institutions; reorganises mobility, work and daily routines; and reshapes industrial structures, employment, value chains and the geography of production. The urgency of this transformation is widely acknowledged. Climate change, fossil-fuel market volatility, geopolitical tensions around energy security and the need to reduce dependence on finite and polluting resources have made decarbonisation a central policy objective. Yet the transition is neither linear nor neutral. It may reduce emissions while increasing costs for some households, generate savings in one sector while shifting consumption elsewhere, create new industrial opportunities while weakening existing supply chains, and improve aggregate efficiency while producing uneven effects across income groups, regions, firms and workers. For this reason, its economic consequences cannot be assessed only through aggregate indicators. They require an analysis of the mechanisms through which the transition operates at different levels of the economy. This thesis contributes to this objective by examining three interconnected dimensions of the energy transition. The first concerns households, where electricity demand depends on appliance ownership, housing characteristics, socio-demographic heterogeneity and investments in efficiency. The second concerns the organisation of work, focusing on how remote work reallocates energy use between homes, workplaces and commuting. The third concerns industrial restructuring, with particular attention to the shift from internalcombustion to electric vehicle production and its implications for the Italian automotive sector. Together, the three essays show that the economic effects of decarbonisation depend on heterogeneity, behavioural responses, institutional settings and productive capabilities. Households are a crucial starting point because residential energy consumption represents a substantial share of final energy demand and is directly connected to essential services such as heating, cooling, lighting, cooking and appliance use. Policies promoting electrification and energy efficiency therefore require a detailed understanding of how households consume electricity. However, residential energy demand is highly heterogeneous. Families differ in income, age structure, dwelling size, geographical location, building quality, appliance ownership and daily routines. As a result, the same appliance or efficiency measure may produce different effects depending on who uses it, where it is installed and under which housing and climatic conditions. Ignoring this heterogeneity may lead to inefficient and inequitable policies, for instance by subsidising households already able to invest while leaving behind those facing financial constraints, inefficient dwellings or higher energy needs. The organisation of work represents a second relevant channel. The COVID-19 pandemic suddenly relocated a large share of economic and daily activities from offices and workplaces to private dwellings. Although exceptional, this shock revealed a broader issue: work arrangements can alter the spatial distribution of energy demand. Remote work may reduce commuting and office energy use, but it may also increase residential electricity consumption. Its environmental impact is therefore not automatic. It depends on whether commuting is actually reduced, whether offices adapt their energy systems to lower occupancy, whether households absorb additional energy needs efficiently, and whether the costs of this reallocation are fairly distributed. In this sense, smart working is not only a labour-market arrangement or an organisational practice, but also a potential instrument of energy-demand policy. The third dimension concerns the industrial side of the transition. Transport decarbonisation, and especially the electrification of the automotive sector, is one of the most politically and economically sensitive components of the European climate strategy. The shift towards electric vehicles changes not only the type of cars sold to consumers, but also the production structure of the automotive industry, the demand for intermediate inputs, the role of suppliers, the importance of batteries and electronics, and the position of countries within European and global value chains. For Italy, whose automotive sector is strongly connected to traditional mechanical components and a dense network of suppliers, electrification may create opportunities but also significant risks. Without appropriate industrial and demand-side policies, it could weaken domestic production capacity, reduce employment and value added, and increase dependence on foreign suppliers for strategic components. Against this background, the thesis addresses three main gaps in the literature. First, although residential energy demand has been widely studied, empirical evidence on appliance-level electricity consumption in Italy remains limited, especially when household and dwelling heterogeneity are taken into account. Detailed sub-metering data are costly and often unavailable, while many studies rely on aggregate consumption data or engineering assumptions. This limits the ability to identify which end-uses drive demand and how efficiency policies should be targeted. The first essay contributes to this gap by estimating residential electricity end-uses through a microeconometric framework based on Italian household data and by assessing the role of efficiency investments. Second, the literature on telework and energy demand has often examined residential electricity, mobility or workplace energy use separately. This may provide an incomplete picture, since an increase in household electricity consumption may coexist with larger reductions in commuting-related energy use and office-building demand. Moreover, much pre-pandemic evidence is affected by self-selection, as workers and firms adopting telework voluntarily may differ systematically from those that do not. The second essay addresses this gap by exploiting the first Italian COVID-19 lockdown as a quasi-experimental setting and by estimating the energy effects of home confinement across households, commuting and service-sector workplaces. Third, while the economic implications of electric vehicles have received increasing attention, less is known about how a full electrification scenario would affect the Italian automotive sector through domestic and international input-output linkages. The transition is often discussed in terms of environmental gains or technological innovation, but its consequences for national value chains, employment and sectoral interdependencies require further investigation. The third essay contributes by constructing counterfactual scenarios for the electrification of automotive production and by assessing how changes in production technology and final demand propagate through the Italian economy. The thesis comprises three essays. The first chapter, ‘The Role of the Heterogeneity of Household Characteristics, Building Features and Efficiency Choices in Residential End-uses Electricity Consumption in Italy’, focuses on residential electricity demand. The second chapter, ‘When the Office Moves Home: Energy Demand Responses to the COVID-19 Lockdown in Italy’, examines the relationship between remote work, home confinement and energy demand. Finally, The third chapter, ‘Towards a Fully Electric Vehicle Production by 2035: Economic Implications for Italy’s Automotive Sector Through an Input-Output Approach’, turns to the industrial implications of the energy transition. Overall, the thesis argues that the energy transition should be analysed as a multidimensional economic transformation whose effects extend beyond emissions and energy balances to household welfare, behavioural responses, labour organisation, mobility, industrial structures and national productive capabilities. The three essays show that policy design must account for the specific channels through which the transition operates: energy-efficiency incentives should reflect household and dwelling heterogeneity; remote work should be evaluated as a reallocation of energy demand across homes, transport systems and workplaces; and automotive electrification should be accompanied by industrial strategies capable of preserving value added, employment and technological capacity. The central policy implication is therefore clear: decarbonisation is necessary, but its economic outcomes are not predetermined. The energy transition can generate environmental gains and economic opportunities, but only if it is governed as a structural transformation rather than treated as a purely technological adjustment.