Peer-to-peer and community-based markets: A comprehensive review

The advent of more proactive consumers, the so-called "prosumers", with production and storage capabilities, is empowering the consumers and bringing new opportunities and challenges to the operation of power systems in a market environment. Recently, a novel proposal for the design and operation of electricity markets has emerged: these so-called peer-to-peer (P2P) electricity markets conceptually allow the prosumers to directly share their electrical energy and investment. Such P2P markets rely on a consumer-centric and bottom-up perspective by giving the opportunity to consumers to freely choose the way they are to source their electric energy. A community can also be formed by prosumers who want to collaborate, or in terms of operational energy management. This paper contributes with an overview of these new P2P markets that starts with the motivation, challenges, market designs moving to the potential future developments in this field, providing recommendations while considering a test-case

Toward sustainable data centers: a comprehensive energy management strategy

Data centers are major contributors to the emission of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, and this contribution is expected to increase in the following years. This has encouraged the development of techniques to reduce the energy consumption and the environmental footprint of data centers. Whereas some of these techniques have succeeded to reduce the energy consumption of the hardware equipment of data centers (including IT, cooling, and power supply systems), we claim that sustainable data centers will be only possible if the problem is faced by means of a holistic approach that includes not only the aforementioned techniques but also intelligent and unifying solutions that enable a synergistic and energy-aware management of data centers. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive strategy to reduce the carbon footprint of data centers that uses the energy as a driver of their management procedures. In addition, we present a holistic management architecture for sustainable data centers that implements the aforementioned strategy, and we propose design guidelines to accomplish each step of the proposed strategy, referring to related achievements and enumerating the main challenges that must be still solved.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

“No powers, man!”: A student perspective on designing university smart building interactions

Smart buildings offer an opportunity for better performance and enhanced experience by contextualising services and interactions to the needs and practices of occupants. Yet, this vision is limited by established approaches to building management, delivered top-down through professional facilities management teams, opening up an interaction-gap between occupants and the spaces they inhabit. To address the challenge of how smart buildings might be more inclusively managed, we present the results of a qualitative study with student occupants of a smart building, with design workshops including building walks and speculative futuring. We develop new understandings of how student occupants conceptualise and evaluate spaces as they experience them, and of how building management practices might evolve with new sociotechnical systems that better leverage occupant agency. Our findings point to important directions for HCI research in this nascent area, including the need for HBI (Human-Building Interaction) design to challenge entrenched roles in building management

Software-Defined Cloud Computing: Architectural Elements and Open Challenges

The variety of existing cloud services creates a challenge for service providers to enforce reasonable Software Level Agreements (SLA) stating the Quality of Service (QoS) and penalties in case QoS is not achieved. To avoid such penalties at the same time that the infrastructure operates with minimum energy and resource wastage, constant monitoring and adaptation of the infrastructure is needed. We refer to Software-Defined Cloud Computing, or simply Software-Defined Clouds (SDC), as an approach for automating the process of optimal cloud configuration by extending virtualization concept to all resources in a data center. An SDC enables easy reconfiguration and adaptation of physical resources in a cloud infrastructure, to better accommodate the demand on QoS through a software that can describe and manage various aspects comprising the cloud environment. In this paper, we present an architecture for SDCs on data centers with emphasis on mobile cloud applications. We present an evaluation, showcasing the potential of SDC in two use cases-QoS-aware bandwidth allocation and bandwidth-aware, energy-efficient VM placement-and discuss the research challenges and opportunities in this emerging area.Comment: Keynote Paper, 3rd International Conference on Advances in Computing, Communications and Informatics (ICACCI 2014), September 24-27, 2014, Delhi, Indi

Economic approach to climate policies and stakes of international negotiations

Cet article traite des différentes modalités qui existent pour gérer un problème d'action collective, comme celui du changement climatique, susceptible d'affecter les conditions de vie et les activités économiques de toutes les régions du monde.changement climatique;négociations internationales;politique environnementale

Community Fisheries Management Handbook

This handbook is a unique product. It is the first "field guide" to community-based fisheries management focused specifically on fisheries, such as those of the Northwest Atlantic, that are already highly regulated by governmental authorities, with licensing and other requirements that limit access and effort. While a variety of resource materials are available on community-based natural resource management, almost all of these are written by practitioners working in the South (developing countries) and rely on case studies and techniques that have been tested in less industrialized tropical fisheries. Therefore, this handbook is one of the few publications about community-based management in 'Northern' fisheries.The need for this handbook was identified by participants working on an initiative on the Atlantic coast of Canada, "Turning the Tide: Communities Managing Fisheries Together" (www.turningthetide.ca). Turning the Tide works for improved fisheries management through community-based approaches, and through cooperative efforts among aboriginal and non-aboriginal communities. To that end, it has brought together fishermen and their communities to share information and ideas on community-based management, through events such as community forums and study tours. Participants recognized the need for a handbook on community-based fisheries management that is relevant to their own fisheries and that can be used as a tool to provide information and support for practitioners, as well as to document current practices and insights obtained, and to promote and raise public awareness about community-based fisheries management. The stories and insights in the handbook are those of Turning the Tide participants and their allies from around the Atlantic Region – the Atlantic coast of Canada and the north-eastern North America-United States – who shared this information during Turning the Tide activities, and in individual and group interviews, and who reviewed the materials used in producing this handbook. The various tools and ideas explored here are currently being applied in the region, and so the handbook demonstrates how community-based approaches to fisheries management are working today