Each country that is part of the Kyoto Protocol has set limits on the amount of greenhouse gases that it can emit, but many countries have limits above their current production. The surplus amount can be purchased by other countries, which allows them to not reduce their emissions if they so wish. Countries also receive […]

At the first UN international Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was adopted. Its provisions on tackling global warming were strengthened in 1997 in Kyoto, Japan, where an amendment was negotiated, called the Kyoto Protocol. Under this protocol, industrialized countries agreed that […]

One of the ways that a system can be made safer is by adding redundancy. If we have a key component, e. g. a relay, that has a probability of failure of q, then, by adding another relay in parallel, so that both would need to fail for the system to fail, the reliability (i. […]

Cost-benefit analysis (CBA) is the basic method that is widely used when trying to decide upon whether to embark on a given project. The first step is to identify the benefits of the project and to assign a monetary value to them. The cost of the project is then calculated and, if the benefits outweigh […]

Besides the costs involved in manufacture, installation, and operation there are related costs that can affect the cost of electricity. If there were a tax on the emission of carbon, that would increase the cost of electricity from fossil fuel power stations. There is a cost in reducing other emissions that are damaging, such as […]

It is common experience from a broad range of technologies that costs fall as production increases. In particular, costs decrease roughly linearly with cumulative production when plotted on a log/log scale. The learning rate for a technology is the percentage reduction in costs for a doubling in cumulative production; typically the learning rate is between […]

The translation of future money to its present value is called discounted cash flow analysis and the interest rate used is called the discount rate R. For N equal annual amounts A, the present value Vp is given by VP=A[1 ~{1 +R)~N]/R. (1U) Derivation 11.1 Discount rate and the present value An amount of Q […]

For all energy technologies we can break down the money involved into three parts. First, capital is required to build the plant. Second, money is needed to maintain and operate (M & O) the plant, and, finally, there is the revenue obtained from selling the energy. A simple measure of the competitiveness of a plant […]