An Environmental and Financial Risk Assessment Protocol for the Investments in the Energy Sector

The programmatic guidelines provided by the European Community encourage Member States to invest more and more in the energy infrastructure sector in order to promote sustainable development. These are projects characterized not only by high complexity profiles but also above all by multiple risk rates, including extra-financial ones. Thus, the aim of this paper is to characterize an innovative risk assessment protocol that overcomes the limits of the economic evaluation techniques generally used in practice. This can be done by characterizing a decisional protocol that allows providing objective criteria for the acceptability of the investment risk, considering also the social and environmental implications that the initiatives of the energy sector generate on the community. The innovative idea is based on the integration of the logic “As Low As Reasonably Practicable” (ALARP) in the procedural schemes of Cost‒Benefit Analysis (CBA). In accordance with the ALARP principle, widely applied to problems concerning health and safety in high-risk sectors such as industrial engineering, a risk is tolerable when the costs to reduce it further are disproportionate to the benefits obtainable. The attempt to use the ALARP logic in the management of investment risk leads to defining a useful tool for informing on the financial, economic and social sustainability of the project initiative. This with consequent repercussions on the entire process of resource allocation is to be earmarked for the environmental sector and, specifically, for the energy.