The Financial Entanglements of Local Energy Projects

There is currently an expansion of local energy initiatives, underpinned by the desire to reduce energy-related carbon emissions and in recognition of the importance of the local arena to achieving such change. Much of the research on these initiatives has been framed by a conventional economic approach, identifying barriers, drivers and incentives to explain their emergence (or not). Here a new economic sociological approach is taken which sees markets as socio-materially constructed and points to the importance of tracing exchange flows and determining modalities of valuation for such exchanges. Artefacts or market devices are seen to play a particular role in connecting actors and technologies within coordinating institutional arrangements and offer the potential for making innovative projects conventional. These aspects are explored in four international case-studies from Wales, Sweden, Germany and USA, mapping relations, identifying exchange flows, pinpointing how artefacts coordinate and showing the multiple modalities of valuation involved in each case. Conclusions concerning the importance of negotiation against a market backdrop and rendering exchange flows more certain are drawn

Bridging “the Great Divide”: Countering Financial Repression in Transition

The large and widening gap between economic performance in Eastern European transition economies and those of the former Soviet Union has been dubbed “the Great Divide” by Berglof and Bolton (2002). This paper provides a rationale for the gap based upon the concept of financial repression. The magnified effects of transition to the market can be attributed to the government manipulation of financial markets in these countries, with the divide defined by the length of time that governments relied upon financial-market manipulation to finance government fiscal policy. Policies undertaken to assist in financing government expenditures caused financial repression and financial fragmentation, to use the terms introduced by McKinnon (1973). After an introductory section, I introduce a theoretical model of real and financial sectors in transition. The dynamic path to equilibrium from transition is derived. It is shown to have a tendency toward output contraction and hyperinflation when government policies promote financial repression. In the third section this hypothesis is examined with macroeconomic data from Ukraine for the period 1992 - 2001. These data are consistent with the hypothesis, although other factors (e.g., recession in trading partners) are also shown to be important.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39895/3/wp510.pd

Cost-Aware Green Cellular Networks with Energy and Communication Cooperation

Energy cost of cellular networks is ever-increasing to match the surge of wireless data traffic, and the saving of this cost is important to reduce the operational expenditure (OPEX) of wireless operators in future. The recent advancements of renewable energy integration and two-way energy flow in smart grid provide potential new solutions to save the cost. However, they also impose challenges, especially on how to use the stochastically and spatially distributed renewable energy harvested at cellular base stations (BSs) to reliably supply time- and space-varying wireless traffic over cellular networks. To overcome these challenges, in this article we present three approaches, namely, {\emph{energy cooperation, communication cooperation, and joint energy and communication cooperation}}, in which different BSs bidirectionally trade or share energy via the aggregator in smart grid, and/or share wireless resources and shift loads with each other to reduce the total energy cost.Comment: Submitted for possible publicatio

Energy Transition and Urban Planning for Local Development. A Critical Review of the Evolution of Integrated Spatial and Energy Planning

The aim of the article is to analyse the evolution of spatial and energy planning integration, seen as a mean to foster local development, from the birth of the theme to the current prospects of shared sustainability and Decentralised Energy System (DES) solutions. The paper is a review of the evolution of the spatial and energy planning integration, exploring weaknesses and future opportunities. After an initial period of intense theoretical elaboration, the relationship between energy and city physical-functional organization and planning is still far from finding an implementation. The article explains this lack of integration through the analyses of significant steps in the last 50 years with the aim to outline current obstacles in achieving a more comprehensive vision of energy and spatial planning. The experiences selected highlight critical aspects concerning the trend towards the divergence of energy planning from systemic urban and spatial planning, also due to the low consideration of energy as a factor for local development. From the processes of decentralization and energy localism, some perspectives emerge which converge on the eco-energy district as a projection of the local energy community and which seem to enhance a more systemic and strategic dimension of planning

Pan-European backcasting exercise, enriched with regional perspective, and including a list of short-term policy options

This deliverable reports on the results of the third and final pan-European stakeholder meeting and secondly, on the enrichment with a Pilot Area and regional perspective. The main emphasis is on backcasting as a means to arrive at long-term strategies and short-term (policy) actions

institutional innovation from the bottom up?

A sustainable economy fulfills societal needs in a fundamentally different way to the current economic system. Improvements to the efficiency of existing technologies or practices appear insufficient for achieving sustainable development within the planetary boundaries. Disruptive, systemic and transformational changes appear necessary in order to replace existing technologies and practices to establish a sustainable economy. Such innovations often start out in niches; however, the scaling up and the ultimate replacement of current socio-technical systems requires governance to allow for the coordination of actors, the reorganization of socio-technical systems and the mobilization and allocation of resources. As governmental institutions are part of the current (non-sustainable) systems and thereby fail to provide coherent, integrated and transformative governance, we explore whether institutional innovation from non-state actors can step in to provide governance of transformation processes. Based on explorative qualitative case studies of networks in the food sector, city planning and reporting tools, we analyze the potential of bottom-up institutional innovations to coordinate actors in transformation processes

Optimization on fresh outdoor air ratio of air conditioning system with stratum ventilation for both targeted indoor air quality and maximal energy saving

Stratum ventilation can energy efficiently provide good inhaled indoor air quality with a proper operation (e.g., fresh outdoor air ratio). However, the non-uniform CO2 distribution in a stratum-ventilated room challenges the provision of targeted indoor air quality. This study proposes an optimization on the fresh outdoor air ratio of stratum ventilation for both the targeted indoor air quality and maximal energy saving. A model of CO2 concentration in the breathing zone is developed by coupling CO2 removal efficiency in the breathing zone and mass conservation laws. With the developed model, the ventilation parameters corresponding to different fresh outdoor air ratios are quantified to achieve the targeted indoor air quality (i.e., targeted CO2 concentration in the breathing zone). Using the fresh outdoor air ratios and corresponding ventilation parameters as inputs, energy performance evaluations of the air conditioning system are conducted by building energy simulations. The fresh outdoor air ratio with the minimal energy consumption is determined as the optimal one. Experiments show that the mean absolute error of the developed model of CO2 concentration in the breathing zone is 1.9%. The effectiveness of the proposed optimization is demonstrated using TRNSYS that the energy consumption of the air conditioning system with stratum ventilation is reduced by 6.4% while achieving the targeted indoor air quality. The proposed optimization is also promising for other ventilation modes for targeted indoor air quality and improved energy efficiency

The Energy Costs of Historic Preservation

We explore the impact of historical preservation policies on domestic energy consumption. Using panel data for England from 2006 to 2013 and employing a fixed effects strategy, we document that (i) rising national energy prices induce an increase in home energy efficiency installations and a corresponding reduction in energy consumption and (ii) this energy saving effect is significantly less pronounced in Conservation Areas and in places with high concentrations of Listed Buildings, where the adoption of energy efficiency instal lations is typically more costly and sometimes legally prevented altogether. The energy costs of preservation are substantial