Proceedings

time, a rising fuel price will also increase the cost of the centralized heating,
encouraging the individuals to cut back their consumption. In this case, the elasticity
of the demand to the price is negative, leading to the decrease of the market due to the
decrease of the consumption. As a consequence, the effects of a rising fuel price on
the size of the market depend on which one of the above described effects is
prevailing.
With regard to the costs, the most important financial effort goes to the fuel
procurement, as the main variable cost. For the plants working on natural gas, the fuel
cost requires future efforts to decrease the consumption, given the high price of the
imported gas. Moreover, the price of the inland procured gas is also on the rise, as the
intention of the governing authorities is to level out the price differences between the
inland and the imported fuel.
As important fixed costs, worth mentioning are the personnel and the maintenance
costs. Similar to any other enterprise, personnel costs are given by the number of
employees and their competence. A specific feature of the heating sector is the fact
that the number and the features of the personnel also depend on the type of fuel
powering the plant, which prescribes the complexity of the equipment to be operated.
As an example, gas plants need relatively few but highly qualified employees, while
coal and oil plants are operated by more, though less qualified employees. Also worth
mentioning is the fact that the operating costs can be significantly decreased if the
plant equipment is operated at the working capacity it was designed for, whereas the
working capacity can be affected by the occasional heat losses in the installation.
3. THE PRODUCTION OF ELECTRICITY FROM WIND ENERGY
3.1 The state of affairs
The production of clean energy is not the object of one, but of several industry
sectors: wind energy, solar energy, geothermal energy, wave energy, biomass energy
etc, different with regard to the growth factors, technology, competition and
profitability. None of these sectors is currently able to produce enough clean energy
as to satisfy the global demand, at a convenient price. Nevertheless, their parallel
existence and development balance the shortcomings of the conventional energy
production with fossil fuels.
The development of the renewable energy sectors is supported by extremely
convincing reasons, given in fact by the faults and current trends of the global
economy: the negative side effects of the fossil fuel consumption (the soil, air and
water pollution, the pools built in the oil sector, the rising fuel prices), the increase of
the global energy demand, the development of the clean energy production
technology, the need to diversify the current energy sources, as a result of the
overload of the existing networks, the rising electricity prices etc.
The global production of wind turbines has important annual growth rates, as the wind
energy is an important electricity source in several European countries, like Denmark,
Spain, Portugal and Germany. As a matter of fact, most important wind energy
companies are European.
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