Economic and Financial Viability Analysis of Renewable Energy Projects

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This chapter discusses the theory underlying measurements of asset utilization as a way to provide support to economic and financial viability analysis of Renewable Energy Projects (REPs). It starts by providing an overview of the literature for economical and financial viability analysis within the Renewable Energy Sector and follows revealing the gap in the literature that this thesis tackles.

2.1 Challenges for Business Evaluation of REPs

There has been advancements on many fronts to make economical and financial viability assessment for Renewable Energy Projects possible, including (but not limited to) production costs (e.g.McAloon, F. Taylor, Yee, Ibsen, & Wooley, 2000); transportation costs (Batidzirai, 2005; Overend, 1982; Searcy et al., 2007); capital costs (Bridgwater & Double, 1991; Gallagher, Schamel, Shapouri, & Brubaker, 2006); resources availability (Graf & Koehler, 2002); environmental performance (Von Blottnitz & Curran, 2007; Taheripour, Hertel, Tyner, Beckman, & Birur, 2008; Pimentel & Patzek, 2007); regional socio-economic development (Swenson & Eathington, 2006), and organizational costs (Altman & Johnson, 2008).

Regarding business development, many studies have focused on the selection of optimum energy-conversion pathways and identification of successful strategies for related business design (e.g. Hamelinck & Faaij, 2006; Junginger et al., 2008). In that sense, full-systems approaches have also been attempted for evaluating overall production performance of particular systems (Bridgwater & Double, 1991; Kerstetter, 2001).

None, however, has successfully presented a simple, yet robust, framework for inferring and comparing economic and financial aspects of Renewable Energy Projects that impact business vi...

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...med throughout the production ladder (one for each stage). Nonetheless, such effect has its advantages as this analysis might make bottlenecks to efficiency more apparent and easily identifiable. It might even be desirable, as some authors suggest that, the exploration and cross-comparison of asset utilization within an industrial sector, only make sense when a “holistic view of the producing chain is kept” (Stadtler, 2008, p. 38). Perhaps such a view will not only increase our overall understanding of the energy system, but also facilitate its mathematical modeling. Although directly calculating the overall energy turn presented by the energy system is our ultimate goal, its direct aggregated estimation would naturally reduce our ability to cross-compare and understand REPs and increase the likelihood of incurring mathematical errors during the process of modeling.

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