Buffering volatility : storage investments and technology-specific renewable energy support

Mitigating climate change will require integrating large amounts of highly intermittent renewable energy (RE) sources in future electricity markets. Considerable uncertainties exist about the cost and availability of future large-scale storage to alleviate the potential mismatch between demand and supply. This paper examines the suitability of regulatory (public policy) mechanisms for coping with the volatility induced by intermittent RE sources, using a numerical equilibrium model of a future wholesale electricity market. We find that the optimal RE subsidies are technology-specific reflecting the heterogeneous value for system integration. Differentiated RE subsidies reduce the curtailment of excess production, thereby preventing costly investments in energy storage. Using a simple cost-benefit framework, we show that a smart design of RE support policies significantly reduces the level of optimal storage. We further find that the marginal benefits of storage rapidly decrease for short-term (intra-day) storage and are small for long-term (seasonal) storage independent of the storage level. This suggests that storage is not likely to be the limiting factor for decarbonizing the electricity sector

Assessing the impact of the EU ETS using firm level data

This paper investigates the impact of the European Unionâ??s Emission Trading System (EU ETS) at a firm level. Using panel data on the emissions and performance of more than 2000 European firms from 2005 to 2008, we are able to analyse the effectiveness of the scheme. The results suggest that the shift from the first phase (2005-2007) to the second phase (2008-2012) had an impact on the emission reductions carried out by firms. The initial allocation also had a significant impact on emission reduction. This challenges the relevance for the ETS of Coaseâ??s theorem (Coase, 1969), according to which the initial allocation of permits is irrelevant for the post-trading allocation of marketable pollution permits. Finally, we found that the EU ETS had a modest impact on the participating companiesâ?? performance. We conclude that a full auctioning system could help to reduce emissions but could also have a negative impact on the profits of participating companies.

Introduction: Interrogating Captive Freedom: The Possibilities and Limits of Animal Sanctuaries

In the last few decades, animal sanctuaries have proliferated around the world as advocates for animals have sought to save them from a wide array of contexts in which they are exploited, harmed, or killed by human actions. Sanctuaries take different forms and employ different approaches to animal care, varying in accordance to the kinds of species they save and the arenas of human animal-use they challenge. A non-exhaustive list of kinds of animal sanctuaries includes sanctuaries for farmed animal (rescued from agricultural contexts), ‘exotic’ animals (such as elephants or big cats, often rescued from being kept as pets or used for entertainment or exhibition), primates (often retired from use in laboratory research), equines (often rescued from use for carriages or in competitive events like racing); and companion animals (for animals like cats and dogs that cannot, for various reasons, be adopted out to individual homes)

Stationarity Changes in Long-Run Fossil Resource Prices: Evidence from Persistence Break Testing

This paper considers the question of whether changes in persistence have occurred during the long-run evolution of U.S. prices of the non-renewable energy resources crude oil, natural gas and bituminous coal. Our main contribution is to allow for a structural break when testing for a break in persistence, thus disentangling the effect of a deterministic break from that of a stochastic break and advancing the existing literature on the persistence properties of non-renewable resource prices. The results clearly demonstrate the importance of specifying a structural break when testing for breaks in persistence, whereas our findings are robust to the exact date of the structural break. Our analysis yields that coal and natural gas prices are trend stationary throughout their evolution, while oil prices exhibit a break in persistence during the 1970s. The findings suggest that especially the coal market has remained fundamentals-driven, whereas for the oil market exogenous shocks have become dominant. Thus, our results are consequential for the treatment of energy resource prices in both causal analysis and forecasting.non-renewable resource prices, primary energy, persistence, structural breaks

Assessing the impact of the EU ETS using firm level data.

· This paper investigates the impact of the European Union’s Emission Trading System (EU ETS) at a firm level. Using panel data on the emissions and performance of more than 2000 European firms from 2005 to 2008, we are able to analyse the effectiveness of the scheme. · The results suggest that the shift from the first phase (2005-2007) to the second phase (2008-2012) had an impact on the emission reductions carried out by firms. The initial allocation also had a significant impact on emission reduction. This challenges the relevance for the ETS of Coase’s theorem (Coase, 1969), according to which the initial allocation of permits is irrelevant for the post-trading allocation of marketable pollution permits. · Finally, we found that the EU ETS had a modest impact on the participating companies’ performance. We conclude that a full auctioning system could help to reduce emissions but could also have a negative impact on the profits of participating companies.panel data, energy, climate change, evaluation econometrics, firm behaviour.

Investments in a combined energy network model: substitution between natural gas and electricity?

Natural gas plays an important role in the future development of electricity markets as it is the least emission intensive fossil generation option while additionally providing the needed flexibility in plant operation to deal with intermittent renewable generation. As both the electricity and the natural gas market rely on networks, congestion on one market may lead to changes on another. In addition, investments in one market have an impact in the other and may even become substitutes for one another. The objective of this paper is to develop a dynamic model representation of coupled natural gas and electricity network markets to test the potential interaction with respect to investments. The model is tested under simplified conditions as well as for a stylized European network setting. The results indicate that there is a potential for investment-substitution and significant market interactions that warrants the application of coupled models especially with regard to simulations of long term system developments

Transport under Emission Trading: A Computable General Equilibrium Assessment

This thesis analysis the impact of private road transport under emission trading using two different Computable General Equilibrium models. A static multi-region model with special emphasis on the European Union, addresses the welfare impact of road transport under the European Emission Trading System. Including terms-of-trade effects, this model does not account for congestion which is the main externality of road transport. Furthermore, technological details of electricity generation which are an important factor in evaluating climate policies are not included. Therefore, the second model is a static Small Open Economy model of the German economy including congestion effects and detailed technological characteristics of electricity generation. The results of both models highlight the important role of already existing taxes on transport fuels for the evaluation of carbon mitigation measures in road transportation

The early stage of corporate venturing - activities and effectuation in a corporate context

Changing Customer needs, globalisation and new technical possibilities demand for internal change within corporations to remain competitive. Corporations need to innovate or die. Increased competition forces corporations to focus on efficiency in exploiting opportunities, leading to a focus on incremental innovation. On the other hand, entrepreneurs are disrupting industries through radical innovations in a fast pace. Corporate entrepreneurship (CE), aims on combining the agility and innovative- ness of start-ups with the resources and knowledge of corporations. However, the way corporate entrepreneurs work as well as the activities they conduct, especially in the early stage has been neglected in CE research. This study has the aim to bridge the knowledge from entrepreneurship towards the context of CE. The entrepreneurship field has progressed significantly, offering a com- prehensive state of knowledge on the activities conducted and the way entrepreneurs work. A single case study with five sub-cases in a major European engineering com- pany has been conducted to address the research gap from the corporate entrepre- neur's view. There are three main contributions to the field of CE: The first contribution is that corporate entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs conduct activities with the same aims in the categories funding, opportunity, planning, legit- imacy building, business development and advice. While the categories remain the same, activities within the categories differ partly due to the context. The second contribution is that corporate entrepreneurs work mainly following effec- tuation, focusing on their means and conducting activities in an iterative way. The need for structure of a corporation induces elements of a predictive logic. The means available to the corporate entrepreneur determine whether product championing takes place. The third contribution is that a corporate support structure should complement the means of an corporate entrepreneur, either through methodical support or support in interdisciplinary team-building. For supporting radical innovations, it is recom- mended to offer facilitated customer- and user-involvement. The indirect-internal form of corporate venturing was found to be more suitable in the case company

Saving Animals: Everyday Practices of Care and Rescue in the US Animal Sanctuary Movement

This multi-sited ethnography of the US animal sanctuary movement is based on 24 months of research at a range of animal rescue facilities, including a companion animal shelter in Texas, exotic animal sanctuaries in Florida and Hawaii, and a farm animal sanctuary in New York. In the last three decades, animal welfare activists have established hundreds of sanctuaries across the United States in an attempt to save tens of thousands of animals from factory farms, roadside zoos, and other sites of contested animal treatment. These facilities function as laboratories where activists conceive and operationalize new models for ethical relationships with animals, models they hope will influence broader public debates. Building on Giorgio Agamben’s concept of homo sacer as a person who lacks all rights and legal protections (1998), this dissertation argues that animals treated by humans as property or material resources can be understood as bestia sacer. Comprising an alterity that defines and makes possible the human liberal subject, bestia sacer is precisely what personhood is not. In an effort to disrupt this category by leveling conventional species hierarchies, animal sanctuary activists strive to create spaces in which humans can interact with animals as autonomous subjects with their own interests worthy of consideration and respect. However, the realities of living with and caring for captive animals often require compromises to this aspiration. Caregivers regularly contend with difficult decisions such as how to best serve animals’ needs with limited resources and when to limit the exercise of animal agency through such practices as sterilization to prevent overpopulation or the segregation of animals deemed dangerous to humans and other animals. Remaining entangled in larger political-economic contexts of animal capital circulation and still susceptible to physical control and potentially harmful treatment by humans as a result of their legal status, animals in sanctuaries are neither fully autonomous subjects nor property. Instead, they function in their relationships with humans as improperty, living beings within a shifting spectrum between property and subjecthood. To the extent that they are able to participate in the sanctuary community as subjects with limited rights to life, sustenance, and freedom from harm, sanctuary animals operate as members of a sort of multispecies polity composed of human and animal citizens. Due to material constraints and the dilemmas of care, though, both animals and caregivers must make sacrifices for the requirements of the larger sanctuary community. As a result, human-animal interactions in sanctuaries constitute a variation of what Wendy Brown describes as “sacrificial citizenship” (2015). To understand how these animals transform from bestia sacer to sacrificial citizens, this ethnography focuses on six main aspects of sanctuary dynamics. Chapter One, “Coming to Sanctuary,” introduces the primary research sites and describes the different ways in which animals arrive at sanctuaries and become improperty in the process. Chapter Two, “History of US Animal Activism,” situates the sanctuary movement in relation to other forms of animal advocacy by tracing the philosophical genealogy and political and social history of the contemporary animal protection movement, examining how conflicting ideologies of human-animal difference and shifting patterns in human-animal relations shaped the landscape of twentieth century animal activism. Chapter Three, Creating and Operating Sanctuaries, examines the political economy of sanctuaries and explores how caregivers navigate the tensions that arise from using rescued animals as fundraising mechanisms while simultaneously seeking to challenge the commodification of these animals. Chapter Four, Animal Care, analyzes animal care practices, specifically focusing on the many post-rescue dilemmas caregivers face and how their methods for addressing these dilemmas transform animals into sacrificial citizens. Chapter Five, Animal Death,” examines one of the most complicated dilemmas of care – the fact that saving animal lives sometimes requires sacrificing animal lives – and explores the different ways that sanctuaries navigate this dilemma through practices of “necro-care,” forms of care that actively employ death in the service of fostering life, such as feeding animals that consume other animals, protecting sanctuary animals from external predators, and euthanizing ill, injured, or dangerous animals. In conclusion, this ethnography considers the possible futures of animal sanctuaries and examines the important role they currently play in furthering the greater animal advocacy movement’s goals. The realization of sanctuaries’ visions for the future of human-animal relations will remain limited without larger transformations in social and political-economic systems of value that still treat animals as means for satisfying human needs. Despite these current limits, sanctuaries are invaluable to the broader animal advocacy movement both for the qualitative difference they make in the lives of individual animals and for the symbolic power these experiments in alternative species relations have in illustrating that different ways of living with animals are possible. Beyond their symbolic value for inspiring struggle toward a better future, sanctuaries perform the essential task of working through the difficulties and contradictions of manifesting that future – the pragmatic labor that must be done in order to achieve more radical transformations in human-animal relations