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Highlights • We analyze the economic value of a U.S windfarm using long-term LCOE information. • Long-term LCOE of wind energy is obtained from two decades of history. • Monte Carlo and Risk-Neutral valuation is used to valuate a reference windfarm. • Managerial flexibilities and generation cost uncertainty make windfarms more valuable. • Real Option accounts for the flexibility of decision-making with stochastic costs. Abstract Renewable energies are a natural replacement for conventional or fossil fuel energy generation. One of these sources, wind energy, has exhibited significant cost reductions during the last decades. Even though this historical cost reduction trend is well known in the industry and in the academia, information on this cost trend and volatility has been scarcely incorporated in previous works, thus a natural concern arises when assessing their influence on the economic valuation of wind farms. Moreover, wind projects are modular in size and have a short time-to-market, providing a valuable managerial flexibility to defer investment under non-attractive market conditions, such as high development cost scenarios. Traditional evaluation tools often consider those scenarios, wrongly assuming that wind-developers would move forward with the project under such conditions. Accordingly, this paper analyzes the effect of incorporating both generation cost history and investment flexibility in the valuation of wind farms in the United States using Real Options methodology. Taking two decades of cost data and a reference wind farm, this "uncertainty-flexibility" effect is incorporated and valued, finding that the value of the wind project is 14.2% larger than the one neglecting such effect – where cost stochasticity and managerial flexibility are ignored. Therefore, traditional tools for project valuation, such as discounted cash flow and scenario analysis can no longer solely be used, as they do not properly account for the cost reduction trend, uncertainty, and managerial flexibility that a wind farm could face. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• We examine the emissions impact of battery storage across sensitivities and regions. • Existing studies focus on dispatch; we show how investment effects drive emissions. • Emissions impacts of storage vary based on policy and market assumptions. • Storage emissions reductions are more likely when wind and solar are lower cost. Battery storage technologies have attracted attention from policymakers for their potential to reduce electric sector emissions by enabling greater wind and solar penetration. Yet existing studies indicate that adding energy storage actually increases emissions. The difference may be explained by the absence in the previous literature of "investment effects" – changes in deployment of other generation technologies after storage is deployed. Our paper tests this hypothesis by evaluating battery-storage-induced emissions changes using a model that accounts for both long-run investment and dispatch effects simultaneously across regions in the United States, which can be used to separate the relative magnitudes of these two effects. Model results indicate that the investment effect dominates the dispatch effect under a range of sensitivities. We find that emissions may increase or decrease with battery storage, depending on policy and market assumptions, with reductions more likely in environments where wind and solar are more economically competitive relative to natural-gas-fired generation. These results suggest that existing studies that only account for operational impacts likely underestimate potential emissions changes from battery storage deployment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]