Particularly in countries with liberalized electricity markets, the price at which generators can sell their output is notoriously volatile. This renders investment decision making extraordinarily dicey. How much will it be possible to sell renewable power for? Often, it can be hard to predict a week ahead, let alone a year or more. Expected profitability represents a potential barrier to renewables development, in other words, not just in the sense of sometimes being unacceptably low, but also in terms of frequently being substantially unknowable. Hence one of this book’s core insights: that
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