Linking meters and markets: Roles and incentives to support a flexible demand side

Present trends in the development of electricity systems are expected to generate a growing need for flexibility in decentralised resources, including demand response. In order to enable decentralised actors to create value, the organisation of markets and incentives should incorporate these new participants. The roll-out of smart metering to electricity consumers is an important precondition to establishing a flexible demand side and will provide essential information flows. On the basis of current incentive structures and related risks, however, the pass-through of information and value from wholesale market participants to the demand side is mostly infeasible, resulting in flexibility tasks being aggregated and delegated to balancing responsible wholesale traders. This analysis focuses on whether current incentives and roles are appropriate and where the design could be improved to establish a flexible demand side with a particular focus on the Danish case. Design-related barriers are identified that affect expected value, associated risks, and the distribution of responsibilities. This serves as a basis to define policy options in the context of Nordic electricity markets. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Challenges and Recommendations for 3D Plant Phenotyping in Agriculture Using Terrestrial Laser Scanners

Active sensing with LiDAR, and terrestrial laser scanners (TLS) in particular, are increasingly being used in plant phenotyping for assessing structural or 3D geometrical plant traits. Although these technologies provide the unprecedented possibility for remote, non-destructive, automatable, and efficient estimation of plant geometry, their deployment does not come without challenges. In this publication, we present a systematic overview of all challenges impacting TLS-based 3D plant phenotyping. We provide actionable recommendations for the end users of the technology, as well as the research questions and possible directions that can contribute the most to resolving these challenges. We specifically focus on TLSs, as we detected a lack in the existing literature dedicated to this sensing system providing a unique compromise between data quality and resolution vs. measurement efficiency and covered volume. The presented discussions are based on the literature review and our own experience in estimating the structural traits of sugar beet and wheat in plant phenotyping experiments.ISSN:2194-9042ISSN:2194-905