Barriers and solutions for the application and development of renewable energy technologies

Renewable electricity technologies have overwhelmingly higher advantages over conventional fuel-systems. Nevertheless, after more than three decades since their conceptualization their presence in electricity systems is hardly visible, except for few success stories in the US and several European countries. The main reason for this slow development is that renewables-based systems have often been regarded as forming a homogenous group of technologies that can be diffused into the current electricity technology configurations by applying some common panacea measures. However, in their journey to the market-place renewable technologies encounter different chains of barriers, and their removal assumes specific combinations of technology-specific and common panacea measures. The present paper investigates the chains of barriers faced by three types of technologies - wind-based, solar-thermal power, and biomass-gasification - and suggests, for each of them, a sequenced set of measures that can contribute to their removal.