Risk Assessment for a National Renewable Energy Target Part II: Employing the Model

A variety of means have driven the remarkable expansion of renewable-energy-generating systems (RESs), including mandates to meet RES-based generation targets. An earlier study proposed a quantitative risk model to estimate the probability of meeting a national RES generation target. That study produced a model based on the specific case of the U.K.'s steps to meet its mandates of using RES-generated energy under European Union's (EU) 2009 Renewable Energy Directive. This paper presents the risk model's design, operation, expected and simulated outputs, sensitivity analysis, and representative case study. Results from applying the model suggest that the U.K. has probabilities of 45.8% and 50% of meeting total energy and transportation targets, respectively, by 2020, but those results drop to 45.5% and 38.4%, respectively, when a simulation accounts for some of the uncertainty in the data. A case study indicates the potential for substantially lower probabilities of meeting the EU 2009 target if the U.K. removed wind RES subsidies. This paper concludes with recommendations for further research to improve the model for energy enterprise forecasting in an era of heightened support for further RES deployment.