Policy instruments fostering wind energy projects - a multi-perspective evaluation approach

During the last decade, a large number of policy instruments have been developed and implemented all over Europe aiming at supporting renewable energy project development. However, the success of the different policy approaches varies significantly. Given the very different mechanisms of the diverse instruments, the design or the selection of appropriate instruments may cause methodological difficulties. In order to support instrument selection, economists have developed several evaluation criteria. However, this paper states that most of the typically proposed and applied criteria catalogues still neglect the interests and requirements of important stakeholder groups. This paper, therefore, proposes a more integrated evaluation approach taking into account the different interests of all relevant stakeholder groups in the three fields: renewable energy business (especially wind industry), policy making and conventional power business. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.