Renewable energy market competence index part 2: Application to CSP technology

The Renewable Energy Market Competence Index that was developed in a previous work is applied to concentrated solar power technology for 18 countries. The index score and rank show very high stability versus variation of the weighting parameter (α) used in the index. Except for only 3 countries (Algeria, Brazil, and Syria), the maximum absolute difference for the two extreme cases of the weighting parameter α for the remaining 15 countries is less than or equal to 10 points, and for 11 countries this difference is less than or equal to only 3 points. Similarly for the two extreme cases of the weighting parameter α, the rank does not change for 5 countries, changes by only 1 position for 7 countries, 2 positions for 1 country, 3 positions for 4 countries, and 7 positions for only 1 country (Algeria). In comparison with the Renewable Energy Attractiveness Index, the minimum correlation between the two common data sets of 11 countries of the two indices for both score and rank is approximately 85%. Despite of the relatively large difference in score (17–22 points) for 3 countries (South Africa, Greece, and Tunisia), the difference in the remaining 8 countries does not exceed 7 points. The analysis of rank difference shows that 5 countries have the same rank in both indices, and that the maximum rank change is only 3 places for only 2 countries.