Progress in Renewable Energy Technologies: Innovation Potential in Latvia

CONCLUSIONS
1. There is a general consensus that proposed statement (hypothesis) about the development of MCDM for analysing RET progress and innovation potential in Latvia is approved and used methodology is accepted as convenient.
2. A comprehensive RET evaluation implied four dimensions – technical, economic,
environmental and social. The research was defined as the MCDM problem, where the question was to decide which RET have the highest potential of development. The extensive literature review conducted shows that MCDM is one of the most used tools for sustainable development evaluation issues.
3. As results show, the dominant countries in shares of renewable energy (Sweden, Finland) have the same RET development trends as Latvia. The leading countries have large resources of hydropower, which represents the high share of HPP in electricity production (Finland –
43,4%, Sweden – 58,5%, Latvia – 87,0%).
4. The result analysis carried out that Latvia should follow the example of Sweden in electricity production and implement WPP installations. Denmark, Lithuania and Sweden also shows high shares of WPP in electricity production – Denmark has 70,9% share of WPP, Lithuania – 62,0% and Poland – 71,5%. Latvia is considered as one of the most efficient locations for
scaling up wind deployment. Supporting wind-based electricity generation presents
profitable markets for investors.
5. For Latvia, bio-energy CHP installations should be considered as sufficiently developed RET. Extra research on the development of low-quality biomass (for example, logging residues) usage is recommended. Bio-energy technologies need to be developed to assess
the EU 2020 targets.
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