Economic benefit of the National Broadband Network

This paper argues that all regions benefit from the NBN but the economic effects are greater in the major cities because of their larger economic activity. Executive summary This paper is a partial summary of a study undertaken in the Centre for Energy-Efficient Telecommunications (CEET) at the University of Melbourne. The study focuses on the potential economic impact of Australia’s NBN. The NBN affects the economy by making online services more widely available. Taking a conservative approach, we have considered just six categories of online services (cloud computing, electronic commerce, online higher education, telehealth practice, teleworking, and entertainment) from which there are documented economic benefits. We have attributed to the NBN only the additional benefit derived from its deployment over and above what we estimate would have been the broadband situation in Australia without the NBN. That is, we have not assumed that broadband availability would have stagnated without the NBN. We do expect, however, that future services will require higher access speeds, generally in the range 10-25 Mb/s. With this assumption and using a well-attested model of the Australian economy, we show that, in the long term, real GDP can be boosted by about 1.8% and real household consumption (a measure of national welfare) by about 2.0%. When we take into account the need to repay the cost of the NBN, GDP increases slightly but the benefit to real household consumption is reduced to 1.4%. Most of the benefit comes from telehealth and teleworking. Because the access speeds (downstream and upstream) required for the services are quite uncertain, we have looked at the effects of access speeds. If all the services except entertainment can be provided with no more than 2.5 Mb/s down and up (typical of implementations today), then the costs of the NBN outweigh the benefits. Real GDP increases by less than 0.2% but real household consumption declines by 0.4%. That is, building an NBN just for entertainment is not economically viable. An analysis of the regional distribution of benefits shows that all regions benefit from the NBN but the economic effects are greater in the major cities because of their larger economic activity

Cutting carbon, not the economy

A drastic change in the way we produce and consume energy is necessary to contain the risk of global environmental catastrophe. For its part, the EU has set agreed to a greenhouse gas reduction target of 80-95 percent by 2050, compared to 1990. However, with the current fuel mix, even the most ambitious improvements on incumbent technologies are unlikely to be sufficient for reaching the reduction targets. Meeting the targets requires low-carbon transition. However, the process of transition will likely be littered with market failures. Hundreds of more-or-less proven low-carbon technologies are competing for market share in the low-carbon system. In order to bring about the transition to a low-carbon energy and transport system at the lowest cost, policymakers should rely as much as possible on private action to choose, develop, and deploy low-carbon technologies. For those market failures that might only be overcome with technology-specific measures, governments should set up a transparent and predictable mechanism for selecting technologies. This Policy Contribution largely draws on research conducted for The great transformation: decarbonising Europeâ??s energy and transport systems. The research leading to these results has received funding from the Fuel Cell and Hydrogen Joint Undertaking (FCH). The views expressed in this publication are those of the author alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of FCH.

Control of a train of high purity distillation columns for efficient production of 13C isotopes

It is well-known that high-purity distillation columns are difficult to control due to their ill-conditioned and strongly nonlinear behaviour. The fact that these processes are operated over a wide range of feed compositions and flow rates makes the control design even more challenging. This paper proposes the most suitable control strategies applicable to a series of cascaded distillation column processes. The conditions for control and input-output relations are discusssed in view of the global control strategy. The increase in complexity with increased number of series cascaded distillation column processes is tackled. Uncertainty in the model parameters is discussed with respect to the dynamics of the global train distillation process. The main outcome of this work is insight into the possible control methodologies for this particular class of distillation processes

Using Bad Learners to find Good Configurations

Finding the optimally performing configuration of a software system for a given setting is often challenging. Recent approaches address this challenge by learning performance models based on a sample set of configurations. However, building an accurate performance model can be very expensive (and is often infeasible in practice). The central insight of this paper is that exact performance values (e.g. the response time of a software system) are not required to rank configurations and to identify the optimal one. As shown by our experiments, models that are cheap to learn but inaccurate (with respect to the difference between actual and predicted performance) can still be used rank configurations and hence find the optimal configuration. This novel \emph{rank-based approach} allows us to significantly reduce the cost (in terms of number of measurements of sample configuration) as well as the time required to build models. We evaluate our approach with 21 scenarios based on 9 software systems and demonstrate that our approach is beneficial in 16 scenarios; for the remaining 5 scenarios, an accurate model can be built by using very few samples anyway, without the need for a rank-based approach.Comment: 11 pages, 11 figure

An Approach to Adapt the Paradigm of Integral Planning to Urban Development

The paper presents results of an examination of planning processes and situations of urban development in Germany. The paradigm of Integral Planning is currently located in a few disciplines, e.g. in the context of energy efficient and sustainable building design, or in the field of organizational development. There has been an attempt to define the term of “Integral Planning” in a generic manner to use the concept across different levels of system boundaries and planning disciplines that were met in this context. Further, an attempt was made to distinguish several characteristics of urban development that can be used to configure an integral planning process more specifically according to the planning situation at hand. The work is part of an accompanying research programme concerning the participating cities in the “Energy Efficient City Contest” (https://www.wettbewerb-energieeffiziente-stadt.de/), awarded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. The contribution should lead to an improved insight in the paradigm of Integral Planning, and an improvement that breaks this approach down into a practical value in communal administration

A new method in data envelopment analysis to find efficient decision making units and rank both technical efficient and inefficient DMUs together

The inefficient DMUs are usually arranged after the technical efficient ones byDEA methods, however, it is possible that a technical efficient DMU neither beefficient nor be more efficient than some inefficient ones. This studydistinguishes between the terms ‘technical efficiency’ and ‘efficiency’ anddemonstrates that the technical efficiency is a necessary condition for beingefficient and it is not an enough condition to call a DMU as efficient DMU. Thestudy identifies the definitions of those terms and gives a new strong method tocharacterize efficient DMUs among the technical efficient ones. The new method,although, avoids the need for recourse to prices, weights or other assumptionsbetween inputs and outputs of DMUs, it is also able to consider the prices andweights. A numerical example is also characterized the worth and benefits of thenew proposed model in comparison with all current DEA models