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The December 2013 Medium Combustion Plants Directive (MCP Directive) proposal was evaluated by the national governments. In the Czech Republic, there are 6710 plants affected by this Directive, which is about 4.6% of the total of 143,000 relevant European plants. The paper introduces our approach of policy impact assessment called SimTool. The costs estimated for the European Commission in the background study (AMEC, 2014) are assumed to reach EUR 5.9 million for the Czech Republic for the preferred scenario by the European Commission. Further presented national impact assessment estimates the induced annual costs of the proposal at EUR 61 million, which is about 10 times greater than the European impact assessment estimate. As part of the national impact assessment, the different fuel categories had to be analyzed separately due to their specific features and different options for achieving the emission limit target values. During the impact assessment, a survey was made in order to determine the source operators’ preferences and responses to the potential adoption of the MCP Directive. Based on the analysis of data from the operators and consultations with experts about the different technologies, technical options for achievement of the proposed emission limits, including an estimate of the operating and investment costs, were proposed. The paper concentrates on the Czech impact assessment approach and discusses the reasons of the discrepancy between the European impact assessment and the Czech version. We argue that the inaccuracies of the European impact assessments are given by usage of the general abatement cost curves in the models which do not reflect the reality sufficiently. This paper states an argument for the necessity to carry out analysis at the local level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development of renewable energy sources has been primarily justified on the ground of environmental policies and energy security, but new jobs opportunities and establishment of new economy sectors may be equally important co-benefits from investments in this sector. The main goal of this paper is to assess the employment benefits of investments in renewable energy in the Czech Republic. We examine the level and rate of the development of the renewable energy sector in the Czech Republic in terms of ('green‘) job creation for the period 2008–2013, in comparison to data from other EU countries, including Germany as a leading early investor in renewables. Whilst the deployment of renewable energy in the Czech Republic has succeeded to create a significant number of jobs (more than 20 000 employees in 2010), our analysis illustrates a strong dependency of job creation on the continuation of financial incentives. We also find that biomass and waste energy processing offer the highest employment per MWh, which benefits employment in (economically fragile) rural areas. We discuss the question of competitiveness of a country that was not amongst the early adopters of renewables, arguing that the technical skills of the labour force in the Czech Republic provide a potential for more sustained investments in the sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]