A Hypothetical Enhanced Renewable Energy Utilization (EREU) Model for Electricity Generation in Thailand

Master's Thesis from the year 2008 in the subject Environmental Sciences, grade: Passed, Assumption University of Thailand (College of Internet Distance Education (CIDE), School of Business Administration), course: Master Thesis Project, language: English, abstract: This thesis presents a research project entitled 'A Hypothetical Enhanced Renewable Energy Utilization (EREU) Model for Electricity Generation in Thailand'. This research is motivated by Thailand's rapidly increasing electricity consumption caused by the country's long-standing above-average economic growth. Consequently, the rising electricity demand can only be satisfied by continuously growing electricity imports and thus creating a significant burden to Thailand's national budget. Further-more, Thailand is heavily dependent on natural gas reserves for electricity generation, however, these are expected to be depleted within only three decades and global price levels for conventional fuels are increasingly volatile with an ascending tendency as well. Therefore, Thailand faces an urgent need to strategically plan for the broad utili-zation of domestic renewable energy resources, which is essential for a more diversi-fied and thus sustainable electricity generation, as well as for the nation's endeavor to become an energy hub within the South East Asian region. Under these circumstances this research conducts a comprehensive literature re-view regarding the past development as well as the current situation of renewable energy utilization in Thailand, which concludes in the identification of the importance of renewable energy in the given context and closes with both a distinctive need as-sessment and a conceptual framework for Thailand's future renewable energy strat-egy. Subsequently, the research introduces a unique primary research endeavor in the form of an explorative expert interview survey, which succeeds in a substantial col-lection of qualitative and in-depth data. These valuable data is first objectively ana-lyzed and second subjectively interpreted and summarized to become the major source for the derivation of a multitude of potential strategic recommendations for an enhanced future renewable energy utilization development in Thailand. Finally, the entirety of theses recommended strategic approaches, based on both the secondary and primary research, are assembled to develop the Enhanced Renewable Energy Uti-lization (EREU) model for electricity generation in Thailand as the fundamental find-ing of this thesis and research project respectively.