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As the world demand for energy continues to grow, a big question is where will all the energy come from and what will the price tag be. With such enormous sums needed, public-private partnerships (PPPs) could play a big role. But the financial crisis has raised worries about funding, and much is still not known about how best to attract PPPs. This report reviews the evidence to date with sectoral reforms and considers different approaches in varying circumstances to help outline the potential role of the private and public sector in: 1) strengthening the corporate governance of private and public utilities; 2) helping governments to establish legal, regulatory, contractual, and fiscal frameworks; and 3) improved market governance to attract private investment. Chapter one reviews the impact of the recent financial crisis on PPP investment compared with what happened in earlier financial crises. It also looks out the latest projections for additional power sector investment needed because of climate change and the possible sources of financing. Chapter two examines how PPP investment in the power sector has fared. It also gives the results of an econometric study that explores which types of incentives and variables matter most to PPPs when they are weighing entering the power sector, especially in renewables, and what influences the ongoing level of investment. The idea is to provide a powerful benchmarking tool at the sector and country levels against which governments and policy makers can evaluate progress on this issue. Chapter three examines four case studies-in China, Brazil, Peru, and Mexico-to identify, disseminate, and promote best practices on alternative ways to attract PPPs.

The direct electricity used by data centers has become an important issue in recent years as demands for new Internet services (such as search, music downloads, video-on-demand, social networking, and telephony) have become more widespread. This study estimates historical electricity used by data centers worldwide and regionally on the basis of more detailed data than were available for previous assessments, including electricity used by servers, data center communications, and storage equipment. Aggregate electricity use for data centers doubled worldwide from 2000 to 2005. Three quarters of this growth was the result of growth in the number of the least expensive (volume) servers. Data center communications and storage equipment each contributed about 10% of the growth. Total electricity use grew at an average annual rate of 16.7% per year, with the Asia Pacific region (without Japan) being the only major world region with growth significantly exceeding that average. Direct electricity used by information technology equipment in data centers represented about 0.5% of total world electricity consumption in 2005. When electricity for cooling and power distribution is included, that figure is about 1%. Worldwide data center power demand in 2005 was equivalent (in capacity terms) to about seventeen 1000MW power plants.

The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is one of the most water-stressed parts of the world. In just over 25 years, between 1975 and 2001. Looking to the future, MENA's freshwater outlook is expected to worsen because of continued population growth and projected climate change impacts. The region's population is on the way to doubling to 700 million by 2050. Projections of climate change and variability impacts on the region's water availability are highly uncertain, but they are expected to be largely negative. To offer just one more example, rainfall and freshwater availability could decrease by up to 40 percent for some MENA countries by the end of this century. The urgent challenge is how to adapt to the future as illustrated by these numbers and how to turn the region's economy onto a sustainable path. This volume suggests new ways of thinking about the complex changes and planning needed to achieve this. New thinking will mean making better use of desert land, sun, and salt water the abundant riches of the region which can be harnessed to underpin sustainable growth. More mundane, but just as important, new thinking will also mean planning for dramatically better management of the water already available. Right now, water is very poorly managed in MENA. Inefficiencies are notorious in agriculture, where irrigation consumes up to 81 percent of extracted water. Similarly, municipal and industrial water supply systems have abnormally high losses, and most utilities are financially unsustainable. In addition, many MENA countries overexploit their fossil aquifers to meet growing water demand. None of this is sustainable while water resources decline. This volume hopes to add to the ongoing thinking and planning by presenting methodologies to address the water demand gap. It assesses the viability of desalination powered by renewable energy from economic, social, technical, and environmental viewpoints, and it reviews initiatives attempting to make renewable energy desalination a competitively viable option. The authors also highlight the change required in terms of policy, financing, and regional cooperation to make this alternative method of desalination a success. And as with any leading edge technology, the conversation here is of course about scale, cost, environmental impact, and where countries share water bodies plain good neighborly behavior.

We model of demand-led growth with endogenous adjustment of labour supply and productivity, an approach that reconciles Harrod’s warranted rate of demand growth with supply. The model delivers a range of growth paths and unemployment rates rather than a single ‘natural rate’. Theoretically, the steady-state growth path may be dynamically stable or unstable, but empirical calibration favours stability. We show analytically that if demand dynamics are stable, supply will converge to the demand-determined growth path. While a minimum unemployment rate ultimately imposes a supply constraint on growth, empirical results show that a wide range of growth rates are feasible across different demand regimes. The results explain how economies can become trapped with low growth due to weak demand or fiscal austerity and suggest policy responses to stagnant demand.

I enumerate some of the narratives about the electricity sector in India and examine them in detail. Coal is a major source for energy in India and forms a significant part of India’s present electricity mix, while the share of renewable energy sources is increasing. Share of hydro has declined over the years, and the share of nuclear is set to rise as several reactors are under construction and more have been approved. The paper comments on limitations of using levelized cost of electricity generation as a metric for comparing different technology options and suggests replacing it by an approach based on system modelling. Electricity demand is rising, and renewable energy sources and large hydro cannot meet the total projected demand. Switching over to a mix that addresses environment concerns has a cost attached to it and these costs need to be recognized and paid. After an examination of narratives, the paper ends with detailed observations about the electricity sector with the objective of providing evidence-supported perspective to public and also inputs for the formulation of policies.

Tourism demand growth during the period between 2000 and 2016 in 25 European countries is calculated using different tourism indicators. It is shown that the number of tourist arrivals and aggregate tourism receipts increase during the period. Tourism receipts per arrival at current prices show a slight increase in the majority of selected countries, while tourism receipts per arrival at constant prices more or less stagnate, ranging from –2% to +2%, and even exhibit sharper decrease in some countries of Southern and Eastern Europe. It can be concluded that tourism growth is predominantly fueled by the increasing number of tourist arrivals and not by receipts per tourist arrival.

Tajikistan's electricity system is in a state of crisis. Approximately 70 percent of the Tajik people suffer from extensive shortages of electricity during the winter. These shortages, estimated at about 2,700 GWh, about a quarter of winter electricity demand, impose economic losses estimated at over United States (US) 200 million dollars per annum or 3 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The electricity shortages have not been addressed because investments have not been made in new electricity supply capacity and maintenance of existing assets has not improved. The financial incentive for electricity consumers to reduce their consumption is inadequate as electricity prices are among the lowest in the world. Without prompt action to remedy the causes of Tajikistan's electricity crisis and with growing demand, the shortages could increase to about 4,500 GWh by 2016 (over a third of winter electricity demand) or worse. The World Bank undertook this study to assist the Government of Tajikistan (GoT) in finding ways to overcome the current electricity shortages and establish a sound basis for meeting the growing electricity demand in Tajikistan. The study focuses on the investments and policy reforms needed between now and 2020 to strengthen the financial, technical and institutional capacity of the Tajik power sector and prepare the GoT for undertaking a major expansion of power supply capacity. The study excludes large hydropower plants with storage, given their complexity and global experience that such projects are subject to delays. The winter electricity shortages are caused by a combination of low hydropower output during winter when river flows are low and high demand driven by heating needs. The GoT should focus its immediate attention on three ways to eliminate the current winter power shortages: 1) ambitious energy efficiency plans to reduce uneconomic power usage; 2) new dual-fired thermal power supply to complement the existing hydropower supply during winter; and 3) increased energy imports to leverage surplus electricity supply in neighboring countries.

The present study investigates an inventory system for seasonal products under variable demand rate and partial backordering in a competitive market. Among various demand rate functions used in the existing literature of economic order quantity (EOQ) models, the logistic-growth function is best known to estimate market already captured and fraction of market remaining to be captured by new seasonal and technology driven items. Weibull distribution well represents the seasonality and versatility of these products. Due to retailers’ reluctance to purchase and store these perishable products, supplier offers the delay in payment. In view of the above, the proposed EOQ model suitable for those items considers the logistic-growth demand rate, Weibull distribution deterioration rate and partial backordering along with fully permissible delay in payment. Since the neutrosophic set quantifies the imprecise information in real-life scenarios, the proposed EOQ model is optimized in neutrosophic environment. A general unconstrained nonlinear mathematical model with neutrosophic coefficients is optimized using the weighted arithmetic mean function, subject to specified neutrosophic norm. A special case with the neutrosophic conjunction norm along with four lemmata is considered to minimize the cost functions with neutrosophic coefficients to proposed EOQ model across various trade-credit intervals. Here, the managerial insights identified through sensitivity analysis advocate to reduce the expenses on early promotions for foreshortening the demand at the beginning of cycle. Also, the present study demonstrates the optimal inventory depletion time to depend on the demand during the shortages in neutrosophic environment.

Mini-grids are a critical way to meet electricity access goals according to current and projected electricity demand of communities and so appropriately sizing them is essential to ensure their financial viability. However, estimation of demand for communities awaiting electricity access is uncertain and growth in demand along with the associated cost implications is rarely considered during estimation of mini-grid sizing. Using a case study of two rural communities in India, we assess the implications of demand growth on financial costs and performance of a mini-grid system consisting of solar photovoltaic (PV) panels and battery storage using two different system sizing approaches. We show a cost-saving potential of up to 12% when mini-grids are sized using a multi-stage approach where mini-grids gradually expand in several stages, rather than a single-stage optimisation approach. We perform a sensitivity analysis of the cost of the two sizing approaches by varying six key parameters: demand growth rate, logistics cost, system re-sizing frequency, likelihood of blackouts, solar PV and battery cost, and degradation rate. Of these, we find that system costs are most sensitive to variations in demand growth rates and cost decreases in solar PV and batteries. Our study shows that demand growth scenarios and choice of mini-grid sizing approaches have important financial and operational implications for the design of systems for rural electrification.

Two main factors have determined the development for successful aquaculture species—productivity growth and demand growth. However, while we have substantial knowledge of productivity growth, our insights are more limited for demand growth. In this article we investigate the demand growth for salmon in the EU and France using an index approach. Depending on exogeneity assumptions, the measure of demand growth will be either price or quantity oriented. The results indicate that demand growth has been substantial as it is 7.6% per year for the EU and 4.7% for France, on average. The demand growth is anything but smooth over time though, as there are several periods with negative demand growth as well as periods with substantially higher demand growth. JEL Classification Code: D12, Q22.