Targets set at the EU level to promote the use of renewable energy sources, the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and energy saving are proving increasingly pervasive and ambitious. In order to minimize the resulting costs for the economic system, environmental policies should be implemented in an integrated way, taking into account the strong interaction between the three different goals. In this respect, a coherent regulatory framework should aim at equalizing costs per unit of saved toe across the different incentive schemes. If this is not the case, the system is likely to reallocate resources inefficiently among the various sectors or classes of market participants. To assess the efficiency of Italy's incentive schemes, a quantitative indicator is developed on the basis of market prices fetched by environmental certificates. Since well functioning environmental markets are supposed to incorporate all the relevant information, including the impact of regulation, unit costs implied by white, green and black certificates' prices in Italy are derived for the period 2005-2007. Given the major regulatory changes introduced for the years 2008-2012, some alternative scenarios, with respect to the electricity sector, are also constructed to infer the trends that are most likely to emerge in terms of incentive's implicit costs. Finally, price (and incentive schemes' unit cost) estimates are projected up to the year 2020 to check their consistency with the targets set by the EU.
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