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Hydropower investments have been subject to intense criticism over environmental issues and the common experience with cost uncertainty. In this study we address the issue of uncertainty in cost projections by applying reference class forecasting (RCF) in order to improve the reliability of costs used for making decisions under uncertainty. This technique makes it possible to closely link contingency estimates to the likely incidence of uncertainty of construction costs for hydroelectric dams. A case study, the Bujagali dam in Uganda, is used to demonstrate how investment appraisal can be enhanced to better account for the risk of cost overruns. While this project has suffered from cost overruns, the net benefits of the dam are still expected to be substantial. We conclude that if historical information from the major financiers of dams is accessible, learning from the past can help to reduce the cost of uncertainty in power planning worldwide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Serbian government has recently introduced the system of feed-in tariffs for electricity generated from renewable sources. The proposed feed-in tariff for photovoltaic electricity is set to 0.23€/kWh paid for 12 years, with the PV electricity produced after the first 12 years being sold at the grid electricity market price for the rest of the plant lifetime. Although such FIT could have been justified by the small, average retail grid electricity price of just 0.054€/kWh for Serbian households, the investment appraisal of a real case of 2.82kWp PV power plant in two Serbian cities of Zlatibor and Negotin, clearly illustrates that the proposed FIT framework is not sufficient to attract investments into PV in Serbia. In the second part of the paper, we have analyzed alternative, more reasonable feed-in tarrif frameworks, with the goal of selecting those able to sustain the PV adoption and diffusion in Serbia. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]