Trends and Conclusions for Business Development in the Renewable Energy Industry

Trend 3: New Revenues Models And Support Mechanisms For Reducing The Green Gas Emissions

Business models based on new and innovative revenue models describe intelligent methods to use new government incentives which contribute to higher revenues. Currently, the main support scheme revenue models are based on selling electricity to the grid, either at a fixed price (guaranteed feed-in tariff, green certificate) or a market price. These are characterized by: use of a feed-in remuneration scheme or developing green certificates. In Germany, the feed in scheme was used as a stable basis for a business model for PV, for wind or biomass facility. The costs for this instrument were covered by the government budget (form taxes) or by a network operator on energy bill (from energy consumers like in Germany). If the producers want to use a part of the production for own consumption they need smart meters. The smart meter controls the electricity supplied to the grid and the electricity taken from the grid (see smart grid). In practice, there are two situations regarding the financial structure of a feed-in based business model: to produce more energy than needed for own consumption, and the need to buy additional energy from the market.

PV technologies and their alternative solutions such as PV/T, Building Integrated Photovoltaic (BIPV), and concentrated solar photovoltaic (CPV) applications of solar PV registered the faster development in the last five years and are on the way to reach the grid parity (Pandey et al., 2016). Therefore, the tendency for PV system in Europe is to be developed without EU support scheme. However, in the future in EU, there will be developed new types of support schemes for new clean technologies.