Short-term forecasts of the spread of wind power technology across countries

The production of electric energy through renewable energy systems is one way to respect Kyoto Protocol limits. The US, although not a subscriber to the protocol, is also committed in some way to creating renewable electric energy and, with respect to wind energy systems, is classified as one of the leading countries. Since when analyzing installed wind turbines capacity it is important to compare similar geographic areas, we propose here to compare the US with Europe. Some leading European countries are also included in the analysis. Estimates and short-term forecasts of the life-cycles of wind power innovations are provided through Generalized Bass models, detecting the effects of the local incentive policies. Furthermore, this class of models came first in the ranking of forecasting accuracy performances over a set of accuracy measures and forecasting horizons, when compared with the Standard Bass, Logistic, and Gompertz models.