A Review of Solar EnergyI Markets, Economics and Policies

Solar energy has experienced phenomenal growth in recent years due to both technological improvements resulting in cost reductions and government policies supportive of renewable energy development and utilization. This study analyzes the technical, economic and policy aspects of solar energy development and deployment. While the cost of solar energy has declined rapidly in the recent past, it still remains much higher than the cost of conventional energy technologies. Like other renewable energy technologies, solar energy benefits from fiscal and regulatory incentives and mandates, including tax credits and exemptions, feed-in-tariff, preferential interest rates, renewable portfolio standards and voluntary green power programs in many countries. Potential expansion of carbon credit markets also would provide additional incentives to solar energy deployment; however, the scale of incentives provided by the existing carbon market instruments, such as the Clean Development Mechanism of the Kyoto Protocol, is limited. Despite the huge technical potential, development and large-scale, market-driven deployment of solar energy technologies world-wide still has to overcome a number of technical and financial barriers. Unless these barriers are overcome, maintaining and increasing electricity supplies from solar energy will require continuation of potentially costly policy supports

Rethinking how to support intermittent renewables

Intermittent renewable energy sources, including solar and wind power, typically remain more expensive than conventional power sources. As a consequence, few intermittent power projects would have been deployed if speci c policy instruments had not been implemented. Existing policy instruments facilitating the deployment of intermittent renewable energy technologies include the feed-in tari , the feed-in premium and the quota system. Based on a numerical analysis, it is shown that these speci c policy instruments do not necessarily facilitate the deployment of valuable energy sources because they ignore the cost of inter- mittency. A valuable intermittent energy source is de ned here as a source of energy which requires little nancial support and which limits the need for capacity payments in order to ensure the security of supply. Based on insights from the numerical analysis, a new policy instrument is suggested: a multiplicative premium. This type of policy instrument would increase the likelihood that valuable intermittent energy assets are deployed in priority

The likely impact of Basel III on a bank's appetite for renewable energy financ

The new Basel III regulations are likely to make long-term financing more expensive, which will affect the financing of capital-intensive renewable energy technologies, because they typically rely on long-term financing. In addition, the capital and liquidity requirements of Basel III are likely to limit the amount of capital available for renewable energy financing from banks in the future. Together, these are threats to renewable energy deployment because limited financing may prevent the financing of some projects and because more expensive loans are likely to make a number of projects uninteresting financially. A potential solution is proposed here, which requires financing capital-intensive energy projects, pooling these investments into a portfolio and selling down the portfolio in tranches to various types of investors. The benefit of this solution for banks is that it will allow them to maintain the financing of capital intensive renewable energy projects, while complying more easily with Basel III

A carbon footprint proportional to expenditure : a case for Norway?

Assuming that emissions originate from the consumption of goods and services, we study the relationship between consumption-based per capita carbon footprint and per capita expenditure for Norway, using 2007 data. A two-region input-output model reveals that the consumption-based per capita carbon footprint is directly proportional to expenditure with an estimated elasticity close to unity. We show that this result is at least partly driven by a near zero-emission power sector, which leads to comparatively low emission intensities for domestically-produced goods and services

Estimating the cost of future global energy supply

This study produces an attempt to estimate the cost of future global energy supplies. The approach chosen to address this concern relies on a comparative static exercise of estimating the cost of three energy scenarios representing di erent energy futures. The rst scenario, the business as usual scenario, predicts the future energy-mix based on the energy plans held by major countries. The second scenario is the renewable energy scenario, where as much of the primary energy supply as possible is replaced by renewable energy by 2050. The cost of the renewable energy generating technologies and their theoretical potential are taken into account in order to create a plausible scenario. The third scenario, the nuclear case, is based on the use of nuclear and renewable energy to replace fossil-fuels by 2050. Endogenous learning rates for each technology are modeled using an innovative approach where learning rates are diminishing overtime. It results from the analysis that going fully renewable would cost between -0.4 and 1.5% of the global cumulated GDP over the period 2009-2050 compared to a business as usual strategy. An extensive use of nuclear power can greatly reduce this gap in costs