This study contributes to the economic discounting debate by examining the welfare and policy implications of distorted time preferences for private investments. The analysis is applied to the energy industry, where it is of particular importance. In the transition to low-carbon energy generation, distorted time preferences are shown to induce a further distortion, in addition to that from the emission externality. Its extent varies directly with the time lag in capital accumulation. In order to implement the socially optimal path, environmental policy needs to be complemented by technology policy. The theoretical findings are applied to the upcoming structural change in the German electricity industry in the 2010s.

Résumé
The present study is a slightly revised version of my PhD thesis which was accepted at the Economics Department of Dresden University of Technology in July 2008. It has a long and a short history. For it began, as suggested theme, as a fundamental evaluation of evolutionary economics for ecological economics, asking, especially, for what the two ?elds actually constitutes and, eventually, relates. In several years of unfruitful dwelling, however, neither of these two young, non-mainstream ?elds proved as constituted at a fundamental level as yet. Rather, ecological economics, founded at the end of the 1980s as an attempt to combine social and natural s- ence approaches(in particular economics and ecology) to study especially long-run environmental problems in an encompassing manner, has mainly developed into an interdisciplinary research forum on environmental-economicissues. Particularly uni?edbycertainnormativestances sharedwithinits community,it constitutes,well understood, a new discpline of its own right, distinct from economics, with its own scienti?c standards, questions, methodologies and institutions (Baumgartner ¨ and Becker 2005). Modern evolutionaryeconomicson the other hand has been a quarter of a century after its inception with Nelson and Winter (1982) still a mainly h- erogeneousendeavor, linked by a (rather amorphous) common interest in economic evolution and a critical stance towards neoclassical mainstream economics, with a certain strength in applied studies on industrial dynamics (Heinzel 2004, 2006).

Contenu
Foundations of the Theoretical Analysis.- A Theoretical Model of Structural Change in the Energy Industry.- Summary of Results, Discussion of Assumptions, and Policy Implications.- Foundations of the Applied Analysis.- Technology Choice Under Environmental and Technology Policies.- Optimal Moments of Transition Under Environmental and Technology Policies.- Conclusions.