Patricia Chaves, born on December 18th, 1975 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Graduated at the end of 2002 in Industrial Engineering with specialization in Power Systems at the Centro Federal de Educacao Tecnológica Celso Suckow da Fonseca / CEFET-RJ in Rio de Janeiro. (Federal Center for Technological Higher Education in Rio de Janeiro). Her international experience began during the studies in 2000/2001, as a guest student for two semesters at the University of Applied Sciences in Munich (Fachhochschule München), when she took part on academic exchange activities including a practical training at the Renewable Energy department of E.ON Energy. After the university, Patricia Chaves worked about 3 years for STEAG do Brasil, a Brazilian affiliate of the German STEAG AG. As part of the international team developing thermal generation projects, she was responsible, among other activities, for the grid-connection of the power plants under planning by the company. In 2005 she was granted with a scholarship from the German Academic Exchange Service, DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst), to specialize in Renewable Energies, coming back to Germany to join the Post-Graduate Programme Renewable Energy (PPRE) at the University of Oldenburg. Patricia graduates as "Master of Sciences in Renewable Energy" in March 2007 with the thesis "The Clean Development Mechanism and the Promotion of Renewable Energy in Brazil".
“The Modern Portfolio Theory applied to Wind Farms Financing”
The continuous expansion of the Wind Energy sector worldwide during the last years is followed by the necessity to improve the economic attractiveness of wind parks to investors and operators. This task demands a deeper understanding of the interaction between the different economic and physical variables involved in this type of investment, and the assessment of new financing alternatives for larger wind energy projects.
In this context, this thesis will apply the concepts of the Modern Portfolio Theory (Harry M. Markowitz) to investigate the economic effects (overall risk reduction) of the investment in a portfolio of wind farms instead of several individual projects. For this purpose the approach has to be interdisciplinary, including the technical aspects of wind farm projects and the economic aspects of financing and risk analysis. Therefore, a careful analysis of the most common sources of uncertainties surrounding the energy yield prediction and the operation of the wind turbines will be performed. This main parameters are included in a procedure to find - in terms of project finance parameters- the best correlation of the individual characteristics of different projects grouped in a portfolio (local wind regimes, turbine types, operation and maintenance concepts, etc.). The research will be academically supervised by Prof. Dr. Bernd Siebenhüner, head of the chair " Ökologische Ökonomie" at the University of Oldenburg and performed, with the support of the expert-teams from the departments Due Diligence and Micrositing, at the German Institute of Wind Energy, DEWI GmbH.