Methods for financial assessment of renewable energy projects: a review

The financial evaluation of renewable energy sources (RES) projects is well explored in the literature, but many different methods have been followed by different authors. Then, it is important to understand if and how these methods have been changing and what factors may have driven new approaches. Therefore, this article aims to explore the publications on the financial evaluation of RES projects from 2011 to 2020 and to present a critical analysis of the reviewed literature. The methods for evaluating RES projects were grouped into four categories: (i) traditional metrics based on net present value, internal rate of return, and payback period; (ii) levelized cost of electricity; (iii) return on investment approach; and (iv) real options analysis. A quantitative analysis was carried out considering aspects related to the relevance of the authors, productivity by country, and the most relevant journals for each of these groups. Then, a qualitative analysis of the main characteristics of the five most cited articles in each group was conducted. The results show that the more traditional methods are still widely used for the financial evaluation of RES projects. However, approaches based on the levelized cost and real options have been growing in importance to tackle the complex features of financial evaluation and comparison of RES projects.- (undefined

Research Progress, Trends, and Current State of Development on PEMFC-New Insights from a Bibliometric Analysis and Characteristics of Two Decades of Research Output

The consumption of hydrogen could increase by sixfold in 2050 compared to 2020 levels, reaching about 530 Mt. Against this backdrop, the proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) has been a major research area in the field of energy engineering. Several reviews have been provided in the existing corpus of literature on PEMFC, but questions related to their evolutionary nuances and research hotspots remain largely unanswered. To fill this gap, the current review uses bibliometric analysis to analyze PEMFC articles indexed in the Scopus database that were published between 2000-2021. It has been revealed that the research field is growing at an annual average growth rate of 19.35%, with publications from 2016 to 2012 alone making up 46% of the total articles available since 2000. As the two most energy-consuming economies in the world, the contributions made towards the progress of PEMFC research have largely been from China and the US. From the research trend found in this investigation, it is clear that the focus of the researchers in the field has largely been to improve the performance and efficiency of PEMFC and its components, which is evident from dominating keywords or phrases such as 'oxygen reduction reaction', 'electrocatalysis', 'proton exchange membrane', 'gas diffusion layer', 'water management', 'polybenzimidazole', 'durability', and 'bipolar plate'. We anticipate that the provision of the research themes that have emerged in the PEMFC field in the last two decades from the scientific mapping technique will guide existing and prospective researchers in the field going forward

Forecasting Innovation Pathways (FIP) for new and emerging science and technologies

International audience"New" and "Emerging Science" and "Technologies" ("NESTs") have tremendous innovation potential. However this must be weighed against enormous uncertainties caused by many unknowns. The authors of this paper offer a framework to analyze NESTs to help ascertain likely innovation pathways.We have devised a 10-step framework based on extensive Future-oriented Technology Analyses ("FTA") experience, enriched by in-depth case analyses. In the paper, we describe our analytical activities in two case studies. The nanobiosensor experience is contrasted with that of deep brain stimulation in relative quantitative and qualitative emphases.We close the paper by reflecting on this systematic FTA framework for emerging science and technologies, for its intended goal, that is to support decision making

Early growth technology analysis : case studies in solar energy and geothermal energy

Thesis (S.M. in Technology and Policy)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, Technology and Policy Program, 2010.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 85-87).Public and private organizations try to forecast the future of technological developments and allocate funds accordingly. Based on our interviews with experts from MIT's Entrepreneurship Center, Sloan School of Management, and IBM, and review of literature, we found out that this important fund allocation process is dominated by reliance on expert opinions, which has important drawbacks alongside its advantages. In this Thesis, we introduce a data-driven approach, called early growth technology analysis, to technology forecasting that utilizes diverse information sources to analyze the evolution of promising new technologies. Our approach is based on bibliometric analysis, consisting of three key steps: extraction of related keywords from online publication databases, determining the occurrence frequencies of these keywords, and identifying those exhibiting rapid growth. Our proposal goes beyond the theoretical level, and is embodied in software that collects the required inputs from the user through a visual interface, extracts data from web sites on the fly, performs an analysis on the collected data, and displays the results. Compared to earlier software within our group, the new interface offers a much improved user experience in performing the analysis. Although these methods are applicable to any domain of study, this Thesis presents results from case studies on the fields of solar and geothermal energy. We identified emerging technologies in these specific fields to test the viability of our results. We believe that data-driven approaches, such as the one proposed in this Thesis, will increasingly be used by policy makers to complement, verify, and validate expert opinions in mapping practical goals into basic/applied research areas and coming up with technology investment decisions.by Ayse Kaya Firat.S.M.in Technology and Polic