Quantification and monetization of employment benefits associated with renewable energy technologies in Greece

This paper formulates and implements an integrated approach for estimating the employment benefits associated with the exploitation of renewable energy sources (RES) in the power sector. It builds up on well-known techniques and makes all the necessary modifications in order to take into account the specific conditions of the RES market. More specific, the proposed approach exploits the input-output methodology for estimating the direct, indirect and induced employment effects associated with the energy technologies in question and the "opportunity cost of labour" approach for expressing these effects in monetary terms. This framework has been implemented to estimate the employment benefits resulting from the development of different RES technologies in Greece, taking into account both the construction and operation phases of the relative projects. The results of the analysis clearly show that the exploitation of RES in the Greek power sector presents significant employment benefits, which are at the same order of magnitude or in several cases even higher compared to the corresponding benefits attributed to the operation of fossil-fueled power plants (e.g. lignite and natural gas). Therefore, the fulfillment of the national target for increasing the penetration of RES into the Greek power sector from approximately 12% today to 40% in 2020, will contribute, apart from the significant environmental improvements, to the overall economic development and the increase of the employment. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.