Abstract :
In the 9th of March 2007, the European Council decided a fixing goal of 20% contribution of the renewable energy sources (RES) on
the total European electric energy production in 2020.
In order to reach such an ambitious goal, all the European countries are adopting different support policies for encouraging the installations
of RES-based generation systems.
In this paper, after a brief review on the main support policies for RES in Europe, the specific situations of four representative countries
(France, Germany, Italy and Spain) are examined, with the purpose of putting into evidence the main differences in the support
policies adopted for Photovoltaic (PV) and Wind systems.
In particular, a comparison based on the calculation of the pay-back-period (PBP), the net present value (NPV) and the internal rate
of return (IRR), for different sized PV and Wind systems, shows that in some situations a support policy can be not convenient for the
owner of the RES-based generation system and that, in many cases, the differences between the way of implementation of the same support
policy in different countries, can give place to significantly different results.
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