Sincronización para el Transport Stream

The utilization of renewable energy sources, as an industry, is rather innovation intensive. Technologies have made enormous progress during the last 20-30 years thanks to experience from their application and their becoming more and more widespread. The most spectacular of all has probably been the advancement in wind

turbine technology.17 Serial production first started in 1979 in Denmark; at the time,

wind turbines’ capacity range, around 20-30 kW (!), was significantly lower than today. Due to their spreading in Germany, Denmark and Spain, as well as the expansion of production capacities, the unit cost of wind-generated electricity in Germany dropped from 80 eurocent/kWh (1990) to 39 eurocent/kWh (2004) (Fouquet-Johansson, 2008, p. 4084).

Today, an „average‖ wind turbine has a capacity of 2-3 MW (!), i.e. hundred times that of the initial value; what is more, some 7-8 MW turbines have already been installed, as well, on an experimental basis (EWEA, 2012).

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As a result of technological development, wind turbine manufacturers’ marginal cost curves are today quite far away from where they were in 1990s. Clearly, it was the three countries already mentioned before (each employing a feed-in tariff scheme) that drove the wind power industry; even today, leading wind turbine manufacturers all come from Germany, Denmark and Spain. FiT schemes are often criticized for being anti-competitive and hence not sufficiently efficient, as the feed-in tariff acts to shield technologies from being exposed to the free market. Which does hold true to a certain extent, yet one should emphasize that it is exactly these features through which they can help premature technologies develop, become more cost efficient and be finally introduced to the market (International Energy Agency, 2011).

In England, for example, neither the initial tender nor the green certificate system introduced in 2002 managed to generate results and growth rates comparable to those of the FiT-countries – in terms of neither installed capacity, nor manufacturing base. The reason might have been that the country’s domestic manufacturers, still in their early development phase, were forced into market competition by the British government too soon, and therefore it was the more experienced Danish manufacturers that supplied England with wind power generation equipment (Menenteau et al. 2003).

TGC schemes have been proved to only support sufficiently efficient and market- ready technologies, because those are the only ones that can make a profit under market conditions. This is illustrated in Figure 5:

Figure 5: The selection of technologies in a green certificate system

Source: based on Ringel, 2006 p.12, with additions by the author

p, C

D1 D2

MC hydro MC solar MC biomass MC wind

P2

P1

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If we determine the common technological marginal cost curve by adding up the individual marginal cost curves of the individual technologies (types of renewable power stations), and plot all of them on the same quality-price(cost) coordinate system, then we can add up the individual marginal costs to arrive at the aggregate supply curve of green energy production, which passes along the minimum points of the MC curves. Whereas the demand curve is, in a TGC scheme, a vertical line at the

value that corresponds to the quota. The figure shows us that if this value is Q1, for

example, then the equilibrium point and the price P1 (energy+GC) associated with it

appear in a section of the aggregate supply curve that only allows for the cheapest technologies (those with the lowest marginal costs – wind turbines and hydropower plants in this very case) to operate.

Technologies that are more expensive than that will not enter the market until the policymaker increases the quantity of certificates to e.g. Q2, which already enables biomass and solar power stations to operate economically, as well. Or until the marginal cost curves of the individual technologies sink to a level where the price they can achieve under the lower quota turns acceptable. Owing to the above mechanism, TGC systems do not facilitate such a shift. Ringel concluded that TGC schemes concentrate on certain specific energy sources rather than supporting a wide range of renewable energies (Ringel, 2006, pp. 11-12).

If a guaranteed feed-in tariff of P2 was introduced to the above figure18, that would

allow for more expensive technologies to already enter the scene in lower quantity ranges. Naturally, this would cost more than if these technologies only had to be supported in a later stage of maturity. Obviously, the first wind turbines would not have been viable, either, with the feed-in tariffs that correspond to today’s technologies; but had FiT schemes not guaranteed higher prices for them, they could never have made it to their current technological level. „The political instrument ’feed-in tariffs’ is very useful to get a technology off the ground, as the income is secured and, thereby, the risk for the developer is reduced.‖ (Ackermann et al. 2001).

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Another important difference between the two schemes is that even though they have the same outcome at point Q2-P2 theoretically, in a FiT scheme, P2 is known to the producer and they can count

on it, while in a TGC scheme, they only know Q2, but not the price associated with it, as that will be

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By serving as a sort of incubator, the „anti-market-exposure shield‖ that FiT schemes provide is better suited for the fostering and development of technologies that are not yet mature for the market.

The IEA arrived at a similar conclusion in its analysis, which distinguished between three stages of penetration/maturity with respect to renewable energies: market initiation, market take-off and consolidation. Regarding the first stage – formation, development, appearance on the market –, the primary goal is to create a safe environment for investors to ensure that the first investments and research and development activities are actually started. For this very purpose, FiT schemes are definitely better suited, as they create a safer atmosphere; and they have already demonstrated that they are indeed capable of setting the development of technologies into motion (IEA, 2011, p.22).