Abstract:The establishment of new photovoltaic (PV) markets in emerging economies represents a business development opportunity for expansion outside traditional energy markets. Appropriate assessment of PV market competitiveness is thus necessary in order to inform policy and regulatory development, and in order to manage risks related to investment. This paper presents an evaluation of PV energy competitiveness using a case study of the emerging residential PV market in South Africa. Competitiveness is defined in light of the risks associated with the financial performance of domestic grid-connected rooftop PV considering the current market status together with three proposed business models, namely net-metering, net-billing, and an energy savings performance contract framework. Financial performance is evaluated in terms of a socket parity evaluation together with a discounted net cash flow analysis. Investment risk assessment was facilitated using a Monte Carlo simulation. The results indicate the highest potential profitability for the energy savings performance contract model, which includes PV system ownership by an energy services company. It is also shown that appropriate application of risk modelling has the potential to inform decisions by investors and policy makers alike that result in improved policy and business solutions that are able to support increased residential PV energy market competitiveness without the need for explicit subsidy frameworks.
This paper examines the implications of the enormous scope of 'sustainability' literature, which reflects the fragmentation of sustainability knowledge -the product of a reductionist tradition. The paper sketches some of the conceptual challenges that need to be addressed if the pursuit of sustainability is to take the important step from fragmentation and 'scarcity', to integration and 'abundance'.Perhaps the most productive response to the sustainability challenge is not to react to each individual problem, at the level of the problem. Perhaps we need now to conceive a higher level of synthesis -an appreciation of the interconnectedness of components in the 'complex system' of human ecology.In particular, the paper explores the important role of commercial enterprise, which is naturally integrative, in grappling with some of these critical issues. It proposes a special role for the 'civic entrepreneur' in helping larger organisations to take the next big step towards practical sustainability by piloting new models of proactive integration and abundance.
"We've made tremendous progress in science for 300 years, since the days of Isaac Newton and the scientific revolution by chopping problems up into smaller and smaller bits and analysing the tiniest parts … but the time has come to move back up. I mean how [do] weunderstand the behaviour of a whole economy? How do we understand the resilience and stability of ecosystems? Or global warming? These are problems with a similar character in that you can't understand them by looking at the little bits. And this is a daunting challengegoing up turns out to be much harder than going down. Synthesis and holism is much more scientifically subtle than analysis and reductionism."
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.