Recently, the international trade of various bioenergy commodities has grown rapidly, yet this growth is also hampered by some barriers. The aim of this paper is to obtain an overview of what market actors currently perceive as major opportunities and barriers for the development of...

Additional efforts will be needed by European countries to improve the energy efficiency, as with current trends the 20% objective will be missed. Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) manufacturing sector is a promising field, as SMEs are less energy-efficient than larger enterprises....

The purpose of this study is to determine past and future energy efficiency of fossil power generation in EU-27. It is found that the average efficiency for gas-fired power generation increased sharply from 34% in 1990 to 50% in 2005 and is expected to increase to 54% by 2015 (based on lower...

Barriers exist for improvement of energy efficiency, of which the principal-agent problem is considered an important one. The principal-agent problem is a potential barrier for energy policies based on economic instruments, as the decision maker may be partially insulated from the price signal...