Lean production arose as a step towards a new era in production systems. It is a working philosophy designed to produce better products using fewer resources to obtain greater benefits. It has been applied to a wide variety of sectors different from the original automotive industry, in which it was developed. However, its application to continuous manufacturing processes of continuous products has been less, especially to the wine-production sector. The wine sector differs greatly from the automobile sector in various fundamental aspects, but it also has common fundamental aspects in its production and logistics systems. An important part of this work has consisted in studying the wineries of the Rioja region. This article analyses the applicability of lean production in the La Rioja wine sector and the results that may be obtained from its application, using value stream mapping as the main tool to identify opportunities for improvement. This piece of research shows that most of the production problems in the wine sector can be tackled using a lean production system, making certain adjustments according to the type of production. It shows the main properties of wine production from the lean viewpoint, and it improves the production and logistics systems.

The incipient large-scale energy-storage technologies are not sufficiently developed yet, which means that the wind power production depends on the wind speed at every moment. This, along with the fact that the wind resource is not constant over time, makes wind power production quite variable. Therefore, an artificial intelligence-based technique (M5P algorithm) is applied to empirical hourly data to determine the influence of wind power technology on the spot market for different levels of wind resource in 2012. It concludes that wind power depressed the spot prices between 7.42 and 10.94€/MWh for a wind power production of 90% and 110% of the real one, respectively. Furthermore, taking into account the important presence of wind power in the Spanish generation mix, the above range has been extended up to 0% in order to determine the worst and best level of wind power production for the Spanish electrical system (from an economical point of view). To do so, both feed-in-tariffs and wind power impact on spot market (merit order effect) have been accounted in accordance with the different levels of wind power production. Since empirical data from 2012 have been used to conduct the research, the results presented in this paper may provide policy makers with a worst and best-case scenario to discuss about the convenience of the last cutting expenses over wind power technology in Spain