Editorial

Citation

Dey, P.K. (2015), "Editorial", International Journal of Energy Sector Management, Vol. 9 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJESM-04-2015-0003

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: International Journal of Energy Sector Management, Volume 9, Issue 2

Increasing environmental concerns and risk of fossil fuel supply prompted us to further our research on renewables. Industries have also emphasized on the usage of renewable energy for sustainable development. All most all traditional power plants have plans to produce power from renewable sources along with fossil fuel technology. This calls for dealing with various technical and management challenges for hybrid operations. Therefore, there is a growing need for collaborative research on innovation in the field of renewable energy management combining technical complexity and sustainable supply chain design.

One of the emerging renewable energy options is biomass to energy. In the UK, it has been targeted to produce 6 per cent of total energy from biomass including waste biomass and municipal solid waste by 2020. The current achievement is 1.5 per cent only. One of the major issues to achieve this target is logistical challenges of biomass-to-energy conversion. The current researches reveal that biomass supply chain optimization is essential to overcome barriers and uncertainties that may inhibit the development of a sustainable and competitive bioenergy market. Quite often, researchers combine geographical information system with optimizational models to derive solutions to many logistical issues including mitigating risk of biomass supply. Although ethanol and bio-diesel are the most worldwide recognized bio-mass-derived liquid transportation fuel product currently, it is expected that there will be a phenomenal growth in other hydrocarbon fuels due to economic, social, environmental and political reasons. Supply chain optimization and sustainability of these fuels supply chain will act as a critical success factor for implementation and successful operations.

This issue covers a wide range of topics under renewable energy management and demonstrates researches on renewable energy planning, implementation and operations of developed and developing countries, covering policy, operational issues, challenges and a few solutions that are implemented successfully.

The first paper by Solarin investigates the unit root properties of hydroelectricity consumption in 50 countries, for the period 1965 to 2012. The study reveals that 26 countries (mostly developing countries) have unit roots in their hydroelectricity consumption series. Campisi, Morea and Farinelli in their article entitled “Economic sustainability of ground mounted photovoltaic systems: an Italian case study”, present an evaluation of the expected cost of a large (1 MWe) photovoltaic system in Italy. The paper contributes in understanding the order of cost of photovoltaic technology to power plants in the absence of government incentives. The study has value for the policymakers to decide on possible incentives to commensurate with the actual difference between the value of the technology and value of the investment. The paper by Kozlovski and Bawah demonstrates a framework for financial assessment of alternatives of hydropower, wind energy and solar energy infrastructures for developing countries and applies to a case of Ghana. The study uses life cycle costing and levelized cost of energy to analyse the alternative decisions. The study by Hassan and Kouhy explores firm-stakeholder environmental accountability (e.g. environmental ethics, environmental management and environmental accounting) relationship in the Nigerian oil and gas industry. The research by Kehrel and Sick attempts to establish direct linkage between oil price and diffusion of renewables. This empirical study is based on publicly available data of 18 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries over 20 years and uses multivariate regression analysis to identify the corresponding diffusion models for selected established and emerging renewables. Moorthy, Sangameswararaju, Ganesan and Subramanian, investigate the effectiveness of Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm for hydrothermal energy management considering emission and the study reveals that the proposed methodology results both reduction of total fuel cost and emission. In their article entitled “Signaling with convertible debt in the renewable energy industry?”, Ettenhuber and Schiereck apply event study methodology, option pricing theory and risk shift analysis to examine capital market reactions, following the issuance of convertible debt by exchange-listed companies of the renewable energy sector.

We are especially interested in publishing contributions from the researchers and industry practitioners in the area of biomass to energy, waste to energy, wind energy, solar thermal and any other non-traditional form of renewable energy sources along with hybrid systems. Prospective authors are requested to submit their unpublished articles and/or special issue proposals through our web portal.

Prasanta Kumar Dey - Editor in Chief