Policies for the development of RES in the European Union - The Sustainability of Renewable Energy in Europe - page 63

• Administrative barriers. The first problem inherent to administrative barriers
is that in many countries there is a large number of organizations who make
decisions about a single market (such as wind power or solar). In this way, it
becomes difficult to obtain permits and secondly funding, given that the time
is considerably longer. Moreover, the interaction among different organizations
might produce substantial inefficiencies. It also adds a problem inherent to local
governments: the EU has pushed on the delegation to the local authorities as
close as possible to the affected communities regarding the development of RES
systems. However, local governments are often poorly informed and lack the
expertise to make decisions strategically and economically appropriate.
• Infrastructural barriers. The main problem related to networks is fundamentally
linked to their obsolescence, because the European electricity networks are the
oldest in the world and are born for the distribution of electricity from con-
ventional power plants. The generation of electricity from RES is different and
requires major structural interventions. Moreover, the connection to the network
is particularly expensive, as well as getting the permission to do so.
• Social barriers. Although the general opinion of people with regard to RES is
substantially positive, there are more and more frequent phenomena of opposi-
tion from the inhabitants of the areas in which certain plants should arise. It is the
so-called NIMBY (“not in my back yard”), which causes strong opposition from
the local population in respect of public works site in their territory. A significant
negative contribution to this phenomenon is the fact that very often people do not
know the origin of the electricity they consume and even what impacts it has on
the environment of reference.
• Economic and financial barriers. The system of incentives and support for RES
are still too expensive and recovery times are long. Investors wishing to carry
out projects in the field of RES are displaced by the inconsistency of certain poli-
cies: in some EU countries, the regulatory framework governing the financial aid
from the state is not reliable and varies from year to year without stability. Even
lenders have difficulties in facilitating investments to provide loans because of
the high risk of the project. Also, there is a strong postponement in the return of
those investments that generate substantial cash-flow problems in the short and
medium term.
The promotion and encouragement of RES have strong reasons, both economic
and geopolitical; in addition to environmental issues relating to obligations arising
from international agreements on climate and energy, the other economic-political
element of great importance is the security or rather the energy independence of the
developed countries. The energy produced from RES is still more expensive than
traditional sources. In order for the energy produced from RES to be competitive
in the energy market based primarily on energy from fossil fuels, the development
of RES must be accompanied by specific incentives and processes of learning by
contributing strongly to this development.
The future growth of the economics of energy from RES is shown by the trend
of the experience gained; the learning curve relates the cumulative quantitative de-
velopment of a product to the development of the specific costs. The phenomenon