Alternative policies to subsidize rural household biogas digesters
Changbo Wang,
Yaoqi Zhang,
Lixiao Zhang and
Mingyue Pang
Energy Policy, 2016, vol. 93, issue C, 187-195
Abstract:
Existing policies of household biogas projects focus mainly on supports on construction, but less consider management and maintenance, resulting in high scrap rate and waste of resources. Alternative policies must be explored to balance construction and operation. Taking the costs and benefits from a typical rural household biogas project, this paper assesses the economic performance at three different subsidy levels, i.e., no subsidy, existing standard and positive externality based standard. Furthermore three subsidy alternatives, one-time, annual and combined option are applied to the externality based standard. The results show that household biogas digesters have unsatisfactory economic performance without any subsidy and even in current subsidy policies. Environmental benefits of the digester were estimated as 2732 Chinese Yuan, significantly larger than existing subsidy standard. To keep continuous work during the 20-year lifespans of digesters, the income disparity of farmers among regions must be considered for policy application. With the increasing of labor costs, the ratio of initial subsidies must be reduced. These results provide policy implications to the future development of biogas projects in terms of both their construction and follow-up management, reuse of the abandoned digesters as well as the exploitation of other emerging renewable energy projects.
Keywords: Household biogas digester; Externalities; Subsidies; Net present value; Cost-benefit analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)
Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421516301082
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:enepol:v:93:y:2016:i:c:p:187-195
DOI: 10.1016/j.enpol.2016.03.007
Access Statistics for this article
Energy Policy is currently edited by N. France
More articles in Energy Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().