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Biogas energy has been introduced into Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs) through various incentives after their accession to the European Union in 2004. This paper contributes to an understanding of the determinants, challenges and perspectives of agricultural biogas plants in three CEECs (Poland, Slovakia, Czech Republic). Using a combination of quantitative (surveys) and qualitative (semi-structured interviews) methods, it particularly addresses varieties in public support for biogas sectors, how the relationships between biogas plants as new energy entities and their locations in rural peripheries are constructed, and how the operation of biogas plants influences local rural development. We found that as a result of various agriculture and agricultural policies in Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic in the second half of the 20th century, the preconditions for the incorporation of agricultural biogas plants into agriculture and rural space generally differ significantly. While in the Czech Republic and Slovakia agricultural biogas plants were usually established within large-scale agricultural farms, in Poland these are rather located off-farm. The most profound challenge for today's biogas plants in all the CEECs studied lies in the transition from direct public incentives to a more self-sufficient business-oriented model focused on cooperation, participation and the involvement of local stakeholders in decision-making, as well as the energy utilization of locally generated agricultural waste and biowaste from households. By accommodation of these principles, agricultural biogas plants in CEECs might become a more useful and sustainable element of the rural energy transition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are two main ways to reduce anthropogenic GHG emissions: energy efficiency improvement and increase usage of renewable energy sources. Taking these two main ways into account, it is possible to analyze the main drivers of GHG emissions in the country and to make forecast of future GHG emissions based on historical trends. The Visegrad group (V4) countries, including Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and Czech Republic were selected to provide comparative assessment of their GHG emission drivers and to evaluate effects of climate change mitigation policies in energy sector on GHG emission trends. The Kaya identity approach was applied allowing to perform simple multiplication. Kaya identity equation substitutes the factors with wellestablished and measurable quantities, which leave little space for ambiguity. The multiplying population size by GDP per capita, energy intensity, and carbon intensity of energy allows to get total GHG emissions in the country and define its energy efficiency or use of renewables are the main drivers of GHG emissions, including the effect of economic growth expressed by GDP per capita. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Various environmental policy instruments supporting the development of renewable energy are used on an increasing scale as part of the policy of mitigating climate change and more. In our paper, we examine the influence of environmental policy stringency on renewable energy production in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia for the period 1993–2012 after controlling for gross domestic product per capita growth, CO2 emissions per capita and income inequality. We use the Panel Pooled Mean Group Autoregressive Distributive Lag model to analyze the long-run and the short-run relationship between restrictiveness of environmental policy and renewable energy generation. The results reveal that, in the long run, a more stringent environmental policy has a positive impact both on the increase in the absolute volume of renewable energy production, as well as on the replacement of energy from fossil sources. Our main findings indicate that renewable energy production is positively influenced not only by the stringency of instruments aimed directly at the development of this energy sector, but also by the stringency of instruments with other environmental goals and by the overall level of restrictiveness of the environmental policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]