Climate change is an issue that requires global attention and co-operation. As climate science develops an understanding of changes to the future climate state, policy makers and engineering project planners beg to know what claims can be made on the subject with a reasonable level of...

The investment decision on the placement of wind turbines is, neglecting legal formalities, mainly driven by the aim to maximize the expected annual energy production of single turbines. The result is a concentration of wind farms at locations with high average wind speed. While this strategy...

In many countries worldwide, investment in renewable technologies has been accelerated by the introduction of fixed feed-in tariffs for electricity from renewable energy sources (RES). While fixed tariffs accomplish this purpose, they lack incentives to align the RES production with price...

To meet the increasing global demand for renewable energy such as wind energy, more and more new wind parks are installed worldwide. Finding a suitable location, however, requires a detailed and often costly analysis of the local wind conditions. Plain average wind speed maps cannot provide a...

South Africa hopes to expand wind and solar power. Success depends on how and where to deploy the technologies. This study develops a 10-year database of expected power generation for these technologies across South Africa. A power system model simulates the performance of different spatial...

This paper examines the relationship between biofuels and commodity food prices in the U.S. from a new perspective. While a large body of literature has tried to explain the linkages between sample means and volatilities associated with ethanol and agricultural price returns, little is known...

We analyze the relationship between the prices of ethanol, agricultural commodities and livestock in Nebraska, the U.S. second largest ethanol producer. The paper focuses on long-run relations and Granger causality linkages between ethanol and the other commodities. The analysis takes possible...

The optimization of turbine density in wind farms entails a trade-off between the usage of scarce, expensive land and power losses through turbine wake effects. A quantification and prediction of the wake effect, however, is challenging because of the complex aerodynamic nature of the...

Ethiopia’s energy sector faces critical challenges to meeting steadily increasing demand given limited infrastructure, heavy reliance on hydroelectric power, and underdevelopment of alternative energy resources. The main aim of this paper is to investigate an optimal least cost investment...