Editorial

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: International Journal of Energy Sector Management, Volume 10, Issue 1

The first issue of 2016 deals with a number of issues and challenges of today’s energy sector in both developed and emerging economies covering energy storage, renewable energy management including solar and biomass, role of social media in managing stakeholders and their participation in decision-making in energy industry, relationship between climate change issues and economic growth, energy-efficiency projects and selecting energy production options from various sources.

In their article entitled “Energy Storage System for Peak Shaving” Kein Huat Chua, Yun Seng Lim and Stella Morris develop a cost-savings analytical tool to provide a quick rule-of-thumb for customers to choose an appropriate size of the energy storage for various tariff schemes.

Nikolaos Apostolopoulos and Panagiotis Liargovas investigate the relationship between regional factors and investment attractiveness of solar energy production. They reveal that general macroeconomic performances of the regions are considered of low priority, while the ones related to the entrepreneurial development such as solar irradiation and land availability are of high priority.

Sebastian Martin and Birgit Grüb provide an in-depth evaluation of how German and Austrian utilities use Facebook to engage stakeholders. Their findings indicate that so far no real stakeholder dialogue has been achieved. Moreover, issues which deeply affect a wide variety of citizens are not emphasised on most Facebook accounts. Therefore, so far the majority of utilities are not using the full potential of Facebook.

Simon Hauser empirically investigates the motivations behind eco-efficiency sustainability measures of firms active in natural gas exploration and extraction from deep shale formations in the northeastern USA. The study derives that the sustainability practices are primarily influenced by internal stakeholders. The regulatory bodies, community and industry stakeholders also play a role.

Åsa Tveten and Torjus Bolkesjø analyse the power market and GHG emission effects of the tradable green certificates (TGC) scheme, by applying an energy system model with high granularity in time and space and detailed power system data for the Nordic countries, Germany, The Netherlands and the UK.

Victoria Uren, Daniel Wright, James Scott, Yulan He and Hassan Saif in their article entitled “Social Media and Sentiment in Bioenergy Consultation” derive that social media has the potential to improve information flows between stakeholders and developers. Sentiment analysis is a viable methodology, which bioenergy companies should be using to measure public opinion in the consultation process. Preliminary analysis shows promising results.

Alberto De Marco, Giulio Mangano, Fania Michelucci and Giovanni Zenezini propose the usage of the Project Finance (PF) scheme as a suitable mechanism to fund energy-efficiency projects at the urban scale and present its advantages and adoption barriers.

Vivek Soni, Surya Singh and Devinder Banwet prioritize Indian energy sector projects, namely Coal, Gas, Hydro and Solar using fuzzy PROMETHHE and Visual PROMETHEE applications.

Prasanta Kumar Dey

Editor in Chief, Aston Business School, Aston University, Birmingham, UK