Renewable energy subsidies in the form of feed-in tariffs implicitly give investors the possibility to shut down their renewable power plants temporarily or permanently. This real option is especially valuable for electricity from biomass, an important pillar of European renewable energy goals. The shut-down option is similar to a put on agricultural commodity prices, while the costs and benefi...

In this paper, we analyse the financial viability and economic sustainability implications of government programs for the development of renewable energy sources, explicitly considering that consumers take environmental issues into account. We envisage a broad policy strategy for the future, which we label the “World Sustainable Scenario”, and we quantify the inter-temporal resource requirement...

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This paper aims at estimating the efficiency of hydroelectric power plants (renewable energy resources) and thermal power plant (non-renewable energy resources) in Iranian provinces. Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) approaches is applied to estimate the efficiency. The network is modeled as a linear system with multiple inputs and one output. Fuel cost, labor force, operation cost are used as in...

Policy interest in renewable energy technologies has been gathering momentum for the past several decades, and increased incentives and funding for renewable energy are often described as the panacea for a variety of issues ranging from environmental quality to national security to green job creation. Sizable policies and programs have been implemented worldwide to encourage a transition from f...

To compare the general equilibrium effects of common environmental policies, I develop a model of directed technical change with endogenous exploration for depletable fossil resources, endogenous innovation in technologies for accessing renewable resources, and endogenous innovation in technologies for converting fossil and renewable resources into energy services. I find that a supply restrict...

This paper studies the impacts of renewable energy support policies on energy prices, fossil fuel supply and thus carbon emissions and climate change. We show that the impacts are highly dependent on capacity constraints of renewable energies and market power in the fossil fuel sector. We differentiate renewable energies by whether they face production capacity constraints (solar vs. biofuels) ...

As the effects of climate change increasingly become a reality, policymakers have recognized the need for more renewable energy, such as wind and solar power, and the benefits of distributed generation. One important way that both renewable energy and distributed generation are being addressed is through the use of electrical net metering policies. Net metering allows property owners to generat...

We present a contract for integrating renewable energy supply and electricity spot markets for serving deferrable electric loads in order to mitigate renewable energy intermittency. The contract which we describe results in a stochastic optimal control problem for minimizing the cost of serving flexible load. We solve the optimal control problem by using a recombinant lattice for modeling renew...