Solar parks are well-defined areas developed in the high solar potential area, with the required infrastructure to minimize the potential threat for the developers. Land occupancy is a major concern for the solar park. The government policy mostly emphasizes the use of waste-degraded land for solar parks. In a competitive energy market, any attempt to use waste-degraded land parcels, without policy regulatory support, can bring large-scale disruptions in the quality and cost of power. The present study investigates the potential of using waste degraded land, with a focus on the impact on the cost of generation and decision making. The study investigates the possibility of including the cost of the externalities in the overall cost economics, through policy and regulatory interventions. Data related to India has been considered in the present analysis. Results show that there are less socio-economic and ecological impacts in using wastelands, compared to land, in urban-semi urban areas with an opportunity cost. Thus, the policy and regulatory interventions could promote wasteland utilization and lure favorable decision-making on investments.
Water has complex cost dimensions and is considered a scarce commodity under a reduced-recycle-reuse system with a full cost recovery strategy. The impact of externalities from the social, economic, and ecological aspects of exploiting water resources are often not accounted into the pricing mechanism. We discuss the current work model as well as a pricing strategy for a water infrastructure program with a full cost recovery strategy. Single and multi-block pricing models are created, and their effect on water pricing is discussed. The impact of externalities is accounted for, and respective cost components, namely, environmental cost, opportunity cost, and ecological imbalance cost are included in the water pricing, to analyze the impact on the cost of produced water. A comparison under the normalized, single-block and multi-block pricing strategy are discussed and the payback period is found. It is seen that the unit cost of potable and non-potable water is brought down from 0.94 USD/m3 and 0.51 USD/m3 to 0.62 USD/m3 and 0.29 USD/m3, respectively using a multi-block pricing strategy. It is recommended that policy interventions in a full cost recovery water pricing strategy should consider the cost of externalities with a multi-block pricing system for breakeven in water infrastructural investments.
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