Assessment of RES cooperation framework between the EU and North Africa

Abstract

Purpose The Renewable Energy Directive 2009/28/EC of the European Union provides another element to cross-border cooperation by allowing Member States to fulfill their 2020 renewable energy sources (RES) targets by implementing joint projects in third countries through the cooperation mechanisms. The purpose of this paper is to assess the country risk, to support bilateral cooperation for RES electricity generation projects. Design/methodology/approach A multicriteria decision support methodology has been developed taking into account three evaluation parameters, namely, the investment framework, the social conditions and the energy and technological status. An additive value model has been constructed, and the UTilitès Additives (UTA) – UTA* (UTASTAR) disaggregation method has been implemented to infer the criteria weights. The obtained ranking of alternatives has been subjected to robustness analysis, and finally the proposed methodology has been applied to five North Africa countries, so as to draw key results. Findings The pilot application of the methodological approach proposed and the model developed was fully compatible with the decision maker’s ranking on a set of fictitious countries and facilitated the assessment of a country’s current situation with regards to its investment, social conditions and energy and technological status. The results regarding the five North African countries examined, indicated the country’s investment framework as the most important factor, from foreign investors’ perspective, affecting a country’s suitability for the implementation of RES projects through a cooperation mechanism and Morocco, as well as Tunisia as the countries with the most suitable conditions for a successful implementation of such projects. Originality/value To the best of authors’ knowledge, there are only very few studies trying to assess opportunities and risks emerging from the implementation of joint projects between European and third countries in the field of electricity generation from RES. There are even less studies using (UTASTAR) method on real-world decision-making problems, and almost none are dedicated to energy sector-related problems.

An AHP-SWOT-Fuzzy TOPSIS Approach for Achieving a Cross-Border RES Cooperation

“…The core objective of this paper is to assess, through case studies and integrated analysis to what extent cooperation with developing neighboring countries can help Europe achieve its RES targets and beyond this, trigger the deployment of RES-E projects in the host countries and create synergies and mutually beneficial circumstances for all involved parties [7]. In order to support the development of cooperation mechanisms and implement a successful collaboration, the current and future situation of the host country need to be examined, so as to be able to develop the most appropriate energy policies [8]. This could be achieved through the analysis of Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) of the country under examination.…”

“…However, SWOT analysis cannot be considered as a sufficient stand-alone tool to solve this energy planning problem. The complex nature of this process requires the use of multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) methods, which seem to be extremely powerful tools and able to deal with the different aspects that these problems include [8,10,11]. MCDM methods have been applied to many energy-related problems, such as energy planning and selection, energy resource allocation, energy policy, management of building energy, transportation systems, and electric utility planning [6,[12][13][14][15].…”

The impact of input data resolution on neural network forecasting models for wind and photovoltaic energy generation using time series data

“…Most regions and jurisdictions have their own regulations regarding production, trade, and distribution of electricity—such as the “Clean Energy for All” package of the European Union that affects 28 member states 8 . National policies also need to address market realities and have to keep up with the rapid change induced by the integration of an increasing ratio of renewable‐based power 9 …”

Supporting Europe’s Energy Policy Towards a Decarbonised Energy System: A Comparative Assessment

“…Due to its ability to deal with ranking of many alternatives based on conflicting criteria, multi-criteria analysis has been one of the very fast-growing areas of Operational Research during the two last decades, with applications in various areas of human activity [16]. Many strategic environmental and energy planning issues have been analysed based on multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) methods [17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26] and especially the use of PROMETHEE method has concentrated great interest as it becomes apparent after an extensive literature review [27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35].…”