MAIN PUBLICATION :

• APPENDIX
• ABREVIATIONS
• GLOSSARY
• REFERENCES
• EVENTS
• Downloads

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; and
  
• 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 (Renewable Electricity Supply interactions with conventional Power generations, Networks and Demand) 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; and
  
• Capital subsidies and cash flows that are hard to predict.