Celine McInerney

How can financial incentives promote local ownership of onshore wind and solar projects? Case study evidence from Germany, Denmark, the UK and Ontario:

Mobilising citizens as investors in local solar photovoltaic and onshore wind energy projects can help meet climate objectives, generate local development opportunities, and build social support for low carbon transition. This can be achieved through the introduction of financial incentives attractive to local actors. To investigate what types of financial incentives are effective at the feasibility, development, construction, and operation stages of project development, we undertake a comparative case study of their use in Denmark; Germany; the UK; and Ontario, Canada. We find that a requirement for incentives such as grants and soft loans at the feasibility and development stages is a distinguishing feature of projects with citizen involvement, reflecting their greater risk aversion, lack of technical experience and financial capacity, and their inability to balance risk across a portfolio of projects. At later project stages, market-independent supports (feed in tariffs, grants, and tax incentives) have been effective in mobilising investment, but market-based supports (feed in premiums and quota schemes) can also be tailored to the specific needs of local community actors. These findings add a new dimension to the growing academic and policy debate about how Governments can effectively mobilise investment from local communities and citizens in distributed renewable technologies.

Optimal Oversizing of Wind Generation Facilities

This paper evaluates the economic benefits to over-installing turbines on wind farm sites in order to capture more energy at low wind speeds. Although this implies curtailment at high wind speeds, we show that oversizing generation facilities can increase returns to investors and reduce system costs. A detailed model-based analysis is developed using British and Irish data, with variations in the range of oversizing, the renewable policy support systems (fixed feed-in tariffs or green certificate premia to wholesale energy prices) and the extent of replacement of fossil generation in the technology mix with wind. In the cases of premia to market prices, we use agent-based, computational learning and risk simulation to model market prices. Not only is oversizing beneficial under fixed feed-in tariffs, but is more so under premia to market prices and increasingly so as wind replaces fossil generation. We suggest policy makers should provide positive support to oversizing.

Have bailouts shifted the burden of paying for healthcare from the state onto individuals

Background/aimsThe financial crisis that enveloped Europe in 2009 created financial pressure for governments and required a number of countries to obtain a financial bailout from the IMF. The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of the financial crisis on public health expenditure in bailout countries and if bailouts shift the burden of paying for healthcare from the state onto individuals.MethodsQuantitative health expenditure data were collected from the WHO and OECD for the period 2004–2015 and evaluated using a comparison of means Welch’s t test.ResultsThe majority of bailout countries recorded a decrease in public health expenditure as a percentage of total government expenditure, with Ireland recording the largest decrease with government health expenditure as a percentage of total government expenditure, falling by 22% (P < .01). In addition, the results also suggest that the burden of paying for healthcare shifted from the state onto individuals in three countries, namely Hungary, Ireland and Portugal, where public health expenditure declined and private expenditure increased significantly.ConclusionsThe ramifications of shifting the burden of paying for healthcare from the state onto individuals at this point remain unclear with further research required to identify the long-term consequences for healthcare.