The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), in cooperation with the Clean Energy Ministerial (CEM), has released a report on the value creation potential of renewable energy.
The report, titled ‘The Socio-economic Benefits of Solar and Wind Energy,' presents policy instruments to maximize national value creation from renewable energy, as well as tools and methods to assess those policies.
May 2014: The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), in cooperation with the Clean Energy Ministerial (CEM), has released a report on the value creation potential of renewable energy. The report, titled ‘The Socio-economic Benefits of Solar and Wind Energy,’ presents policy instruments to maximize national value creation from renewable energy, as well as tools and methods to assess those policies.
A core feature of the report is a conceptual framework for analyzing the socio-economic effect of large-scale renewable energy deployment along four themes: macro-economic, distributional, energy-system related and additional effects. It illustrates the framework with a more detailed account of macro-economic effects of solar and wind using four variables: value-added, gross domestic product (GDP), welfare and employment.
The findings underscore the need to measure socio-economic effects of renewables across each step in the value chain, including project planning, manufacturing, installation, grid connection, operation and maintenance and decommissioning.
The report offers specific recommendations for the design and implementation of policies that maximize value creation through: cross-sectoral, locally tailored socio-economic analyses; policy mixes tailored to country conditions and priorities; and appropriate and systemic data gathering and value creation estimation. [Publication: The Socio-economic Benefits of Solar and Wind Energy]