MAIN PUBLICATION :

• APPENDIX
• ABREVIATIONS
• GLOSSARY
• REFERENCES
• EVENTS

Social and Financial Barriers

The OPTRES stakeholder consultation showed that social barriers fall into three categories:

• Opposition from local public (NIMBY)
• Lack of awareness of the benefits of renewable energy
• Invisibility of the full costs of electricity from non-renewable energy sources (RES-E)

Financial barriers can be caused by the existing national frameworks and vary depending on the Member State’s electricity system. The RESPOND project (2006-2009) claims that the growing amount of RES-E affects the electricity system and can only be efficiently integrated if it leads to economically efficient, market-based responses from different stakeholders. In practice, however, current electricity market regulation does not always give sufficient incentives to market participants for an optimal support of integration of RES-E.

The financial barriers that were identified during the OPTRES stakeholder consultation can be divided into two main categories:

• Lack of certainty among banks or investors
• Capital subsidies and cash flows that are hard to predict