Local actors at community level often thrive for energy autarky to decrease the dependence on imported energy resources. We assess the potentials and trade-offs between benefits and costs of increasing levels of energy autarky for a small rural region of around 21,000 inhabitants in Austria. We...

Wind energy has been the fastest growing and most promising renewable energy source in terms of profitability in recent years. The annual installed capacity in the European Union (EU) has risen from 814 MW in 1996 to 10,163 MW in 2009. However, one major drawback of wind energy is the...

Feed-in tariffs (FIT) are among the most important policy instruments to promote renewable electricity production. The fixed-price FIT (FFIT), which guarantee a fixed price for every unit of produced electricity and the premium based FIT (PFIT), which pay a premium on top of the market price are...

The large amount of CO2 emissions and of fossil fuel consumption caused by the transportation sector makes the sector central for attaining the EU energy and climate policy targets. Consequently, new propulsion systems are developed in the automotive industry, which currently have cost...