Assessing the Strength and Effectiveness of Renewable Electricity Feed-in Tariffs in European Union Countries

In the last two decades, feed-in tariffs (FIT) and renewable portfolio standards (RPS) have emerged as two of the most popular policies for supporting renewable electricity (RES-E) generation in the developed world. A few studies have assessed their effectiveness, but most do not account for policy design features and market characteristics that influence policy strength. In this paper, we employ 1992-2008 panel data to conduct the first analysis of the effectiveness of FIT policies in promoting solar photovoltaic (PV) and onshore wind power development in 26 European Union countries. We develop a new indicator for FIT strength that captures variability in tariff size, contract duration, digression rate, electricity price, and electricity generation cost to estimate the resulting return on investment. We then regress this indicator on added RES-E capacity using a fixed effects specification. We find that FIT policies have driven solar PV and onshore wind capacity development in the EU. However, this effect is overstated without controls for country characteristics and may be concealed without accounting for the unique design of each policy. We provide empirical evidence that the interaction of policy design and market dynamics are more important determinants of RES-E development than policy enactment alone.Renewable energy, Feed-in tariff, Panel data models

Characterizing Urban Household Waste Generation and Metabolism Considering Community Stratification in a Rapid Urbanizing Area of China

The relationship between social stratification and municipal solid waste generation remains uncertain under current rapid urbanization. Based on a multi-object spatial sampling technique, we selected 191 households in a rapidly urbanizing area of Xiamen, China. The selected communities were classified into three types: work-unit, transitional, and commercial communities in the context of housing policy reform in China. Field survey data were used to characterize household waste generation patterns considering community stratification. Our results revealed a disparity in waste generation profiles among different households. The three community types differed with respect to family income, living area, religious affiliation, and homeowner occupation. Income, family structure, and lifestyle caused significant differences in waste generation among work-unit, transitional, and commercial communities, respectively. Urban waste generation patterns are expected to evolve due to accelerating urbanization and associated community transition. A multi-scale integrated analysis of societal and ecosystem metabolism approach was applied to waste metabolism linking it to particular socioeconomic conditions that influence material flows and their evolution. Waste metabolism, both pace and density, was highest for family structure driven patterns, followed by lifestyle and income driven. The results will guide community-specific management policies in rapidly urbanizing areas

Making negotiated land reform work : initial experience from Brazil, Colombia, and South Africa

The author describes a new type of negotiated land reform that relies on voluntary land transfers negotiated between buyers and sellers, with the government's role restricted to establishing the necessary framework for negotiation and making a land purchase grant available to eligible beneficiaries. This approach has emerged-following the end of the Cold War and broad macroeconomic adjustment--as many countries face a second generation of reforms to address deep-rooted structural problems and provide a basis for sustainable economic growth and poverty reduction. The author describes initial experiences in Brazil, Colombia, and South Africa. It is too soon to know whether negotiated land reform can rise to the challenges administrative land reform failed to solve but the data so far suggests that: 1) Negotiated land reform can succeed only if measures are taken to make the market for land sales and rentals more fluid transparent. 2) Productive projects are likely to be the key to market-assisted land reform. The potential for project productivity establishes an upper bound on the price to be paid and a basis for financial intermediaries to evaluate the project. It also requires beneficiaries to familiarize themselves with the realities they're likely to confront as independent farmers and the limits to how much land reform can help them achieve their goals. 3) The only way to effectively coordinate the entities involved in the process is through decentralized, demand-driven implementation. 4) The long-run success of land reform depends on getting the private sector involved and using the land purchase grant to"crowd in"private money.Banks&Banking Reform,Environmental Economics&Policies,Agricultural Knowledge&Information Systems,Municipal Housing and Land,Land Use and Policies,Environmental Economics&Policies,Agricultural Knowledge&Information Systems,Municipal Housing and Land,Rural Land Policies for Poverty Reduction,Banks&Banking Reform

Moving up the Waste Hierarchy in Maine: Learning from “Best Practice” State-Level Policy for Waste Reduction and Recovery

As Maine residents look toward the future, it is increasingly clear that more sustainable waste and materials management solutions will be necessary. A recent stakeholder engagement process involving nearly 200 industry professionals, municipal representatives and citizen groups confirmed this point. As we move together toward a more sustainable waste management system, participants in the engagement process identified an outstanding need to learn more about policies options. This article responds to that need with a review of state level policies designed to reduce waste generation and increase material recovery rates. We find there are a wide variety of state-level policy tools available, each of which involves a series of complex tradeoffs to balance decision criteria ranging from diversion potential and cost to social acceptability and environmental protection. While there is no magic formula, it is clear that the most successful state-level programs are those that utilize a variety of tools, selected as part of a comprehensive and data-driven long term planning process

Moving up the Waste Hierarchy in Maine: Learning from “Best Practice” State-Level Policy for Waste Reduction and Recovery

As Maine residents look toward the future, it is increasingly clear that more sustainable waste and materials management solutions will be necessary. A recent stakeholder engagement process involving nearly 200 industry professionals, municipal representatives and citizen groups confirmed this point. As we move together toward a more sustainable waste management system, participants in the engagement process identified an outstanding need to learn more about policies options. This article responds to that need with a review of state level policies designed to reduce waste generation and increase material recovery rates. We find there are a wide variety of state-level policy tools available, each of which involves a series of complex tradeoffs to balance decision criteria ranging from diversion potential and cost to social acceptability and environmental protection. While there is no magic formula, it is clear that the most successful state-level programs are those that utilize a variety of tools, selected as part of a comprehensive and data-driven long term planning process

A dynamic simulation of low-carbon policy influences on endogenous electricity demand in an isolated island system

This paper considers the dynamics of electricity demand in response to changes arising from low-carbon policies and socio-economic developments. As part of an investigation into the evolution of such systems on small economically-developed islands, endogenous electricity demand and associated policies are studied for the Azorean island of São Miguel. A comprehensive System Dynamics (SD) model covering the period 2005 − 2050 is presented which captures both historical behaviours and real-world influences on the endogenous demand dynamics of an island-based electricity system. The impact of tourism, energy efficiency and electric vehicles (EV) expansion allied with associated policy options, are critically evaluated by the SD model using a series of scenarios. The model shows that energy efficiency measures exhibit the most significant long-term impact on electricity demand, while in contrast, policies to increase tourism have a much less direct impact and EV expansion has thought-provoking impacts on the long-term demand, although this is not as influential as energy efficiency measures

Climate policy costs of spatially unbalanced growth in electricity demand: the case of datacentres. ESRI Working Paper No. 657 March 2020

We investigate the power system implications of the anticipated expansion in electricity demand by datacentres. We perform a joint optimisation of Generation and Transmission Expansion Planning considering uncertainty in future datacentre growth under various climate policies. Datacentre expansion imposes significant extra costs on the power system, even under the cheapest policy option. A renewable energy target is more costly than a technology-neutral carbon reduction policy, and the divergence in costs increases non-linearly in electricity demand. Moreover, a carbon reduction policy is more robust to uncertainties in projected demand than a renewable policy. High renewable targets crowd out other low-carbon options such as Carbon Capture and Sequestration. The results suggest that energy policy should be reviewed to focus on technology-neutral carbon reduction policies

Design and Implementation of a Measurement-Based Policy-Driven Resource Management Framework For Converged Networks

This paper presents the design and implementation of a measurement-based QoS and resource management framework, CNQF (Converged Networks QoS Management Framework). CNQF is designed to provide unified, scalable QoS control and resource management through the use of a policy-based network management paradigm. It achieves this via distributed functional entities that are deployed to co-ordinate the resources of the transport network through centralized policy-driven decisions supported by measurement-based control architecture. We present the CNQF architecture, implementation of the prototype and validation of various inbuilt QoS control mechanisms using real traffic flows on a Linux-based experimental test bed.Comment: in Ictact Journal On Communication Technology: Special Issue On Next Generation Wireless Networks And Applications, June 2011, Volume 2, Issue 2, Issn: 2229-6948(Online

Using real-time information to reschedule jobs in a flowshop with variable processing times

Versión revisada. Embargo 36 mesesIn a time where detailed, instantaneous and accurate information on shop-floor status is becoming available in many manufacturing companies due to Information Technologies initiatives such as Smart Factory or Industry 4.0, a question arises regarding when and how this data can be used to improve scheduling decisions. While it is acknowledged that a continuous rescheduling based on the updated information may be beneficial as it serves to adapt the schedule to unplanned events, this rather general intuition has not been supported by a thorough experimentation, particularly for multi-stage manufacturing systems where such continuous rescheduling may introduce a high degree of nervousness in the system and deteriorates its performance. In order to study this research problem, in this paper we investigate how real-time information on the completion times of the jobs in a flowshop with variable processing times can be used to reschedule the jobs. In an exhaustive computational experience, we show that rescheduling policies pay off as long as the variability of the processing times is not very high, and only if the initially generated schedule is of good quality. Furthermore, we propose several rescheduling policies to improve the performance of continuous rescheduling while greatly reducing the frequency of rescheduling. One of these policies, based on the concept of critical path of a flowshop, outperforms the rest of policies for a wide range of scenarios.Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación DPI2016-80750-

Towards Model-Driven Development of Access Control Policies for Web Applications

We introduce a UML-based notation for graphically modeling systems’ security aspects in a simple and intuitive way and a model-driven process that transforms graphical specifications of access control policies in XACML. These XACML policies are then translated in FACPL, a policy language with a formal semantics, and the resulting policies are evaluated by means of a Java-based software tool