Abstract
Waste and biomass are considered to be an important fuels and renewable energy resources to construct a sustainable society in Japan. However, there are concerns about economic competitiveness and compliance of environmental regulations. There is few engineering and economic analysis for the emerging “green energy” industry in the literature. This paper deals with the evaluations for public policy and private enterprise that require a resource supply analysis that including both costs and impacts to the environmental pollutions. We use engineering cost estimates and econometric modeling taking into account local variation in cost-determining factors such as waste & biomass contents, competition from alternative supplier, geographic density in the region and compliance of environmental regulations. Then using our estimates, we develop an optimal technological choice model and apply to prefecture-level data in Japan. Our results show that waste and biomass are more important energy source than previous estimates.
