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Every day news show that the environment is being destroyed due to human intervention. Green house gas emissions have been increasing excessively and much hasn't been done to avoid this. With this scenario, electric vehicles appeared many years ago and were always seen and presented as a green solution. However, they have been repeatedly put aside in detriment of internal combustion engine vehicles. Portuguese governments have already acknowledged the importance of this matter and have already invested, as well as other European and American countries, on this technology. It is noticeable, due to the issues previously referred, that the interest on this technology has been increasing. Therefore, it is important to evaluate if it is viable to purchase an electric vehicle when compared to a conventional vehicle, in the Portuguese ...

"Available online 13 March 2020, In Press" ; Brazil is one of the world key players in the mining industry. This sector has also a remarkable role on the Brazilian economic and social development. Nonetheless, the economic, social and environmental impacts of the sector have not yet been fully documented, debated or understood in reports presented by companies and public organizations in the country. In this context, this research aims to contribute to this debate by analysing sustainability in the Brazilian mining sector. For this research, the approach has used mostly a qualitative method, interviews, coupled with content analysis of reports of public mining agencies. Results showed that sustainability assessment and communication is still an emergent process in Brazilian mining, since only a few large companies have been reporting their sustainability initiatives. The results provide also evidence of the existing gap between large and small companies, with the latter showing lower levels of awareness of the impact of their activities. Based on these findings, this research has concluded on the need for closer cooperation between government, public mining agencies and companies to raise levels of knowledge and awareness within companies, towards sustainability practices and communication initiatives. ; The authors would like to thank to CAPES and Without Borders scholarship (Brazil), BEX Process 10.190-13-9 for providing financial support to this research. This work has been also supported by national funds through FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia, Portugal, within the R&D Units Project Scope: ...

Ensuring the supply of affordable energy, improving energy efficiency and reducing greenhouse gas emissions are some of the priorities of the governments of several countries. The pursuit of these energy goals has triggered interest in the exploration and usage of Renewable Energy Sources (RES), which can be particularly appropriate for island systems as is the case of Cape Verde. This work proposes a generation expansion planning model for Cape Verde considering a 20 years' period. Different scenarios were analysed, each one representing a possible RES contribution for electricity production, reaching a 100% RES share. The results demonstrate that the increase of the RES in the system will lead to an increase of the total cost of energy. However, both CO2 emissions and external energy dependency of the country significantly decrease. The seasonality of the RES resources, and in particular of wind power is shown to be one of the most important challenges for the effective uptake of such a renewable power system. While the proposed model allowed already to present some useful scenarios, it becomes also evident the need to expand the analysis, and the paper concludes with directions for future research.

All rights reserved. Ensuring the supply of affordable energy, improving energy efficiency and reducing greenhouse gas emissions are some of the priorities of the governments of several countries. The pursuit of these energy goals has triggered interest in the exploration and usage of Renewable Energy Sources (RES), which can be particularly appropriate for island systems as is the case of Cape Verde. This work proposes a generation expansion planning model for Cape Verde considering a 20 years' period. Different scenarios were analysed, each one representing a possible RES contribution for electricity production, reaching a 100% RES share. The results demonstrate that the increase of the RES in the system will lead to an increase in the total system cost. However, a significant decrease in both CO2 emissions and external energy dependency of the country is projected. The seasonality of the RES resources, and in particular of wind power is shown to be one of the most important challenges for the effective uptake of such a renewable power system. A least-cost solution might be possibly achieved if storage technologies would be considered within the modelling approach (e.g. battery and Power-to-Gas technologies) which would also contribute to accommodate the Critical Excess of Electricity Production (CEEP). While the proposed model allowed already to present some useful scenarios, it becomes also evident the need to expand the analysis by using hourly data and taking into account the sector's integration (e.g. power, heat and transport). ; INCT-EN - Instituto Nacional de Ciência e Tecnologia para Excitotoxicidade e ...

The topic Sustainable Development has brought a wide discussion across a number of sectors in our society, namely in Power Systems. Given the need to address other concerns than the economic ones, decision makers must take into account the rationale that lies beneath strategic choices, such as investing in generation technologies using renewable energy or rather doing business as usual and installing fossil fuel power plants. In this paper logic models were used as a decision-aid supporting tool, with the aim of contributing to the assessment of the possible impacts of different power plants in terms of sustainable development. The analyzed electricity generation technologies were grouped in thermal, renewable energy sources (RESs) and nuclear. The literature review fed the construction of three relational diagrams to allow the visualization of environmental, social and economic causes and effects of the three groups of technologies. Departing from these initial diagrams a set of interviews with experts was conducted to enrich and validate the logic models. The results of the literature review and of these interviews allowed to conclude that the use of RES has wider positive social impacts on the long run, despite their short-term higher costs compared to the traditional groups (nuclear and thermal). These logic models revealed to be a useful tool providing a valuable starting approach for an Impact Assessment of the ongoing change that power systems have been going through. ; This work was financed by the QREN – Operational Programme for Competitiveness Factors, the European Union – European Regional Development Fund and National Funds – Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology, under Project FCOMP-01-0124-FEDER-011377 and Project ...

A Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) tool was designed and used to support the evaluation of different electricity production scenarios. The MCDA tool is implemented in a user-friendly Excel worksheet and uses information obtained from a mixed integer optimization model, to produce a set of optimal schemes under different assumptions. Given the input, the MCDA allowed ranking different scenarios relying on their performance on 13 criteria covering economic, job market, quality of life of local populations, technical and environmental issues. The MCDA tool was used by a group of experts and academics with background in economics, engineering and environment. Regarding the totality of results, both the most and least expensive scenarios ranked first the same amount of times. These scenarios were, respectively, "Coal", relying mainly in new coal power plants and "Maximum Renewable", relying mainly in new wind and hydro power facilities. The opinions were divided towards these two solutions with different fundamental characteristics: "Maximum Renewable" with costs higher than "Coal" but leading to substantial reduction of the external energy dependency. Sensitivity analysis suggests that, although the costs are regarded as the most important criterion, those who had different rankings in their preferences have different attitudes towards other criteria. ; This work was financed by: the QREN Operational Programme for Competitiveness Factors, the European Union e European Regional Development Fund and National Funds e Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology, under Project FCOMP-01- 0124-FEDER-011377 and Project ...

Life Cycles of both products and services significantly consume renewable and non-renewable resources across a worldwide scale. Thus, eliciting an enormous environmental impact, that is known to disproportionately instigate crises into the socio-economic and political domains of our civilization. Therefore, Creation of Shared Value and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) have been considered by Policy makers, Public and Private Institutions. In addition to Corporate Philanthropy, CSR practices also encompass a wide spectrum of activities, including Stakeholder safety/welfare, designing sustainable products and ecological restoration to name a few which are ascertained to capital and knowledge intensive in nature. Therefore, this paper primarily structures the scope of CSR and proposes a mechanism for trading Corporate Social Responsibility credits in order to incentivize stakeholder centered business practices. Furthermore, the CSR credits trading methodology would entail similar mechanisms used by its remotely successful predecessors namely, tax incentives, tradable credits/certificates and flexible mechanisms for implementing sustainable projects. The CSR credits trading methodology is envisioned to entail a more holistic approach towards overall Sustainability when compared to Carbon Offsets/Renewable Energy Certificates which are more focused towards reducing the environmental footprint. ; The author acknowledges the contribution of MIT Portugal Program, University of Minho and Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT), Portugal (Foundation Of Science and Technology, Portugal) for the scholarship grant SFRH / BD / 33794 / ...

The increasing uncertainty surrounding the electricity generating sector has implications on the forecasting accuracy and makes sensitivity analysis an essential tool for electricity power planning. The fuel price volatility and the emissions trading schemes represent major sources of uncertainty, as the relative economic interest of thermo power plants and of renewable energy sources largely depends on these two factors. In this paper, an electricity planning model will be used to analyse both these aspects, identifying the relative importance and sensitiveness of the optimal electricity power plans to changes on these parameters. ; QREN – Operational Programme for Competitiveness Factors, European Union – European Regional Development Fund and Portuguese Foundation for Science and ...

This paper focus on the assessment of the social dimension of electricity planning, resourcing to participative methodologies. A guide for interviewing power systems experts, covering a wide range of themes is presented. The guide focus on evolution of electricity consumption and supply according to each type of technology, driving forces among emerging technologies, energy policy, the relevance of sustainable development among institutions and markets and, finally, a first impression on the relevance of social impacts for candidate technologies. The main aim of the methodology is to gather discourses among experts and try to understand the connection between narratives and their consequences on the best scenarios under the social point of view. Therefore, the interview uses both uantitative and qualitative questions. The former are used for creating electricity generation scenarios within a 10 year range, while the latter aim at gathering each position's underlying explanations, which will be useful for cluster analysis in future work. The results presented in this paper refer to interviews which took place among the members of the working group of the project "Sustainable Electricity Power Planning". ; This work was financed by: the QREN – Operational Programme for Competitiveness Factors, the European Union – European Regional Development Fund and National Funds- Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology, under Project FCOMP-01- 0124-FEDER-011377 and Project ...

The topic Sustainable Development has brought a wide discussion across a number of sectors in our society, namely in Power Systems. Given the need to address other concerns than the economic ones, decision makers must take into account the rationale that lies beneath strategic choices, such as investing in generation technologies using renewable energy or rather doing business as usual and installing fossil fuel power plants. In this paper logic models were used as a decision-aid supporting tool, with the aim of contributing to explain the connection between building a given power plant and assessing its possible impacts in terms of sustainable development. All the electricity generation technologies were grouped in thermal, renewable energy sources (RES) and nuclear. The literature review fed the construction of three technology generation groups inference and relational diagrams to allow the visualization of environmental, social and economic causes and effects. The results of the literature review and of a set of interviews with experts, based on the diagrams, allowed to conclude that the use of RES have wider positive social impacts on the long run, despite their short-term higher costs compared to the traditional groups (nuclear and thermal). ; This work was financed by: the QREN – Operational Programme for Competitiveness Factors, the European Union – European Regional Development Fund and National Funds- Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology, under Project FCOMP-01-0124-FEDER-011377 and Project ...

This paper overviews previous research addressing the inclusion of the, social dimension of sustainable development on power systems planning. Consequences of the recent energy policies and strategies are already being felt in, developed countries' power systems, with the integration of rising quotas in renewable, energy technologies. However, while the tools that aid decision making on power, planning show that economic and environmental issues are easily quantifiable and thus, modeled, social concerns have been addressed in a less extensive and more, subjective way, implying in most cases expert participation on multi-criteria decision aid, techniques. A survey of recent papers providing public perceptions on electricity, generation technologies and projects is presented. These papers were chosen and, reviewed in order to present a representative array of methodologies that are used to, assess social acceptance of technologies. According to some of the reviewed papers, this issue is suggested to be fundamental to increase project success. As a conclusion, stands the fact that further discussion is still needed in order to achieve solid, agreement, among experts, over what are the positive and the negative drivers to, social sustainability; otherwise models will not be able to translate reality and improve it, under this point of view. ; This work was financed by: the QREN – Operational Programme for Competitiveness Factors, the European Union – European Regional Development Fund and National Funds - Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology, under Project FCOMP-01-0124-FEDER-011377 and Project ...

In a way to reduce the external energy dependence, increasing also the investments in renewable energy sources and aiming for the concretization of the European renewable objectives, the Portuguese government defined a goal of 5100 MW of installed wind power, up to 2012. If the drawn objectives are accomplished, by 2010 the wind power share may reach values comparable to leading countries like Denmark, Germany or Spain. The Portuguese forecasts also indicate a reinforcement of the natural gas fired generation in particular through the use of the combined cycle technology, following the European tendency. This analysis sets out to evaluate the total generating cost of wind power and CCGT in Portugal. A life cycle cost analysis was conducted, including investment costs, O&M costs, fuel costs and external costs of emissions, for each type of technology. For the evaluation of the externalities ExternE values were used. The results show that presently the wind power production cost is higher than the CCGT one, at least from the strictly financial point of view. CCGT costs increase significantly when charges for externalities are included. However, they only reach levels higher than the equivalents for wind power for high externality costs estimations. This partially results from the low load factor of the wind farms in Portugal and also from the lowemission levels of the gas fired technology used in the comparison. A sensitive analysis of the technical and economical parameters was also conducted. Particular attention was given to the natural gas prices due to the possible increase over time. The fuel escalation rate is the parameter that has larger effects on the final costs. It was verified that the total cost of wind plant is more influenced by the load factor than the total cost of ...

There have been several challenges concerning the decisions and timing of new investments in the Brazilian power electricity generation due to irreversibility characteristics and uncertainty inherent in the sector, such as the volatility of electricity prices. Large hydropower plants are getting difficult to implement in the Brazilian generation sector, primarily due to environmental concerns and political pressure. Therefore, there has been an increasing focus on investments of small-scale hydropower plants (SHP). In this context, this paper analyses the use of Real Option (RO) theory for decision-making concerning the investment in SHP's in Brazil. This paper investigates the possibility for the entrepreneur of postponing its participation in the auctions proposed by the government. The deferral option can bring relevant value to the evaluation of SHP since the investor has the option to wait until more favorable conditions appear, e.g., better electricity prices or authorization. Therefore, the application proposed in this paper may be considered as a novel approach regarding the application of the RO theory. For this purpose, a real SHP of 7 MW of installed capacity was used as an investment case and it was assumed that the entrepreneur has the option to participate in the auctions in the next three years (2018 - 2020). A comparison of the results considering the traditional economic analysis (based on the discounted cash flows) is undertaken to evaluate the proposed approach. It can be concluded that the deferral option in participating in the auction can be considered a real option for investors and this time flexibility might bring financial advantages since the uncertainties are reduced. Furthermore, the methodology proposed in this paper has great potential to assess future SHP project evaluation and can be adapted to evaluate other power options. ; - ...

Renewable energy technologies are part of the solution to meet future increasing demand of electricity and decommissioning of power plants in the European Union. Public opinion surveys indicate general support of these technologies, but particular projects face local opposition, a phenomenon known in the literature as the NIMBY (Not In My BackYard) hypothesis. In this study, the public opinion on renewable energy technologies was analyzed by means of a survey implemented in Portugal. The survey addresses four technologies: hydro, wind, biomass and solar power. The study has three main purposes: firstly, to recognize if the people acknowledges the existence of these technologies, secondly, to study the validity of the NIMBY hypothesis in Portugal while realizing in which technology it is more pronounced, and thirdly to perceive the levels of acceptance of each technology, under Sustainable Development aspects (Economy, Ecology and Society). The results suggest that acknowledgement of technology decreases with age, increases with educational degree and is greater in males. There is a generally positive attitude towards new projects of all technologies, and this tendency is more pronounced for solar power. Solar power plants are regarded by the Portuguese public as the most desirable technology in terms of economic and environmental aspects, while hydro power is perceived as the RES technology that can contribute the most to local residents' welfare. ; This work was financed by: the QREN – Operational Programme for Competitiveness Factors, the European Union – European Regional Development Fund and National Funds- Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology, under Project FCOMP-01-0124-FEDER-011377 and Project ...

The results of a state of the art review conducted so far, make clear the relevance of addressing the socio-economic return of public investment, in particular the support provided by the European Union programmes to R&D projects at national or regional level. However, according to the theoretical and empirical literature survey and, based on the experience and studies made in different countries and institutions, it seems that a formal appraisal of the socio-economic added value of these support programmes is ultimately needed. Besides that, the consultation of relevant experts and competent authorities seems to be an essential element for the evaluation process. This research work aims to present a participatory methodology that may be used to assess the social impact of the R&D programmes and their contribution to the general social welfare. Based on the literature survey and on the empirical analysis, a hierarchical set of attributes and measurable indicators was chosen in order to characterise qualitatively and quantitatively the R&D programme goals and achievements. These indicators were then presented to a group of experts, chosen from companies and national organisms directly involved in public programmes or in charge of projects supported by these programmes. The final output of this research is a proposal of a final ranking, indicating the relative importance of each attribute and of each individual indicator as a measure for the socio-economic added value of an R&D ...