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Offshore wind projects require large investments. Therefore, they currently need governmental support to become competitive and economically attractive for investors. There is a general consensus that a feed-in premium scheme would be most adequate to support offshore wind generation in the North Sea. With increasing distance from shore, scarcity of adequate cable routes, and an increasing need to reduce cost, cross-border projects between two or more North Sea states come into discussion. After discussing different support schemes, we argue that existing nationally oriented instruments have to be amended to become applicable to cross-border projects envisioned in the North Sea. In order to support our arguments quantitatively, we introduce a novel optimization framework that is able to account for the impact of implementing different types of feed-in premium based wind supporting schemes (generation-based and capacity-based) on the development of the offshore grid in the North Sea region. For a given level of support for wind development, an optimal plan includes the grid and offshore wind capacities. The transmission capacities are set in such a way that the congestion revenue collected throughout the life time of the project pays off the investment cost of building the grid. At the same time, the remuneration of the offshore wind farms pays off the unsubsidized initial investment cost of building the wind farms, provided that the premium level is selected adequately. Numerical simulation results are interpreted in economic terms and appraise the quality and effectiveness of the proposed approach. The paper will end with an outlook of how such a joint support scheme might be implemented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The established European targets should play a leading role in the complex economic process of energy consumption, and the emerging countries have to consider their implications for adjusting the energy policies at national level. This paper develops investigations on the causality relationship between energy consumption and GDP in the context of emerging European countries covering the period 1980–2013. This research covers the limits identified by previous researchers, by detailing the energy consumption by sources and by referring to five emerging countries in Europe. Unlike most of the previous studies it has a double approach: long and short-run bidirectional relationships. A detailed analysis on the impact of economic growth on the energy consumption by country is conducted in order to contribute to the enrichment of the research field. Towards this objective, a three-step analysis is performed: stationarity, cointegration and causality tests are considered. The empirical study shows mixed results. There is a balance in confirming conservation, growth and neutrality hypotheses. In some specific cases results imply that energy consumption and economic growth are jointly determined. However, a comparative analysis for different significance levels draws attention on the differences in judgment of results for this type of studies. Discussions on the results in terms of causality are conducted in order to identify future trends for research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]