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

Transition UGent: a bottom-up initiative towards a more sustainable university

The vibrant think-tank ‘Transition UGent’ engaged over 250 academics, students and people from the university management in suggesting objectives and actions for the Sustainability Policy of Ghent University (Belgium). Founded in 2012, this bottom-up initiative succeeded to place sustainability high on the policy agenda of our university. Through discussions within 9 working groups and using the transition management method, Transition UGent developed system analyses, sustainability visions and transition paths on 9 fields of Ghent University: mobility, energy, food, waste, nature and green, water, art, education and research. At the moment, many visions and ideas find their way into concrete actions and policies. In our presentation we focused on the broad participative process, on the most remarkable structural results (e.g. a formal and ambitious Sustainability Vision and a student-led Sustainability Office) and on recent actions and experiments (e.g. a sustainability assessment on food supply in student restaurants, artistic COP21 activities, ambitious mobility plans, food leftovers projects, an education network on sustainability controversies, a transdisciplinary platform on Sustainable Cities). We concluded with some recommendations and reflections on this transition approach, on the important role of ‘policy entrepreneurs’ and student involvement, on lock-ins and bottlenecks, and on convincing skeptical leaders

Game-theoretic Resource Allocation Methods for Device-to-Device (D2D) Communication

Device-to-device (D2D) communication underlaying cellular networks allows mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets to use the licensed spectrum allocated to cellular services for direct peer-to-peer transmission. D2D communication can use either one-hop transmission (i.e., in D2D direct communication) or multi-hop cluster-based transmission (i.e., in D2D local area networks). The D2D devices can compete or cooperate with each other to reuse the radio resources in D2D networks. Therefore, resource allocation and access for D2D communication can be treated as games. The theories behind these games provide a variety of mathematical tools to effectively model and analyze the individual or group behaviors of D2D users. In addition, game models can provide distributed solutions to the resource allocation problems for D2D communication. The aim of this article is to demonstrate the applications of game-theoretic models to study the radio resource allocation issues in D2D communication. The article also outlines several key open research directions.Comment: Accepted. IEEE Wireless Comms Mag. 201

Developing an Agenda for Change for New Jersey's Urban Water Infrastructure

A water infrastructure crisis looms in New Jersey's oldest and largest cities -- cities that comprise nearly one-fifth of the state's population and are projected to absorb much of its future growth, and yet have combined sewer systems, which carry both sewage and rainwater, dating to the 19th century. These combined sewers include overflow relief points that, during rain events, often result in combined sewer overflows (CSOs), which discharge raw sewage into waterways. These combined systems can also result in raw sewage backing up into city streets, parks and homes, threatening public safety and health. Of the nation's 860 communities plagued historically by CSOs, just 84 have yet to upgrade their systems or adopt plans to address the problem. Twenty-one of those 84 communities -- one-quarter -- are located in New Jersey. Urban water infrastructure challenges in New Jersey are not limited to the 21 cities with combined sewers. Even outside the CSO cities, polluted stormwater runoff is the state's leading threat to water quality. Many sanitary and separate storm sewer pipes and water-supply lines in the state are more than 100 years old and showing their age. The annual statewide loss (via leaks) of treated drinking water is estimated at 20 -- 22 percent, with some distribution systems losing as much as 45 percent. Water main breaks and resulting service outages are a common aspect of life in many cities. In addition, preexisting flooding problems are being exacerbated by more intense rainfall events driven by climate change, and such events are expected to become more frequent in the future. Most notably, in October 2012 Hurricane Sandy dramatically exposed the vulnerability of many of New Jersey's urban water systems to flooding and other storm damage. Collectively, the problems stemming from aging and degraded water-supply, wastewater and stormwater infrastructure threaten to disrupt daily life, commerce and industry in these communities, and stunt their future economic prosperity.In May 2014, The Johnson Foundation at Wingspread partnered with New Jersey Future and the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation to convene a diverse group of New Jersey leaders to develop an agenda for change aimed at catalyzing action to address urban water infrastructure challenges in the state. Participants represented diverse perspectives, including those of local, state and federal government; public and investorowned water utilities; economic and community development organizations; environmental groups; businesses; and finance and technology companies. The discussions focused on establishing guiding principles for improving urban water infrastructure in New Jersey's cities, identifying the driver for action and agreeing on priority action steps to stimulate progress on the issue. The convening resulted in two products:a three-page consensus "Agenda for Change for New Jersey's Urban Water Infrastructure", which captured the collective priorities of the group, andthis report, which elaborates upon the consensus document and presents The Johnson Foundation's synthesis of the broader range of information, insights and ideas shared during the convening

A Survey of Green Networking Research

Reduction of unnecessary energy consumption is becoming a major concern in wired networking, because of the potential economical benefits and of its expected environmental impact. These issues, usually referred to as "green networking", relate to embedding energy-awareness in the design, in the devices and in the protocols of networks. In this work, we first formulate a more precise definition of the "green" attribute. We furthermore identify a few paradigms that are the key enablers of energy-aware networking research. We then overview the current state of the art and provide a taxonomy of the relevant work, with a special focus on wired networking. At a high level, we identify four branches of green networking research that stem from different observations on the root causes of energy waste, namely (i) Adaptive Link Rate, (ii) Interface proxying, (iii) Energy-aware infrastructures and (iv) Energy-aware applications. In this work, we do not only explore specific proposals pertaining to each of the above branches, but also offer a perspective for research.Comment: Index Terms: Green Networking; Wired Networks; Adaptive Link Rate; Interface Proxying; Energy-aware Infrastructures; Energy-aware Applications. 18 pages, 6 figures, 2 table