Austria between “social protection” and “emancipation”: Negotiating global flows, marketization and nostalgia

Focused on Austria, a national context that still ranks amongst the comparatively more affluent and structurally resilient, this chapter examines diverse public discourses formulated in the context of the global and European economic crises since 2008 and their local impact; the economy’s perceived ‘disembedding’ and hypercommodification are shown to lie at the heart of current Austrian concerns, further entrenching a clash between nationalist nostalgia and inclusive multiculturalism, respectively

Designing low-carbon power systems for Great Britain in 2050 that are robust to the spatiotemporal and inter-annual variability of weather

The design of cost-effective power systems with high shares of variable renewable energy (VRE) technologies requires a modelling approach that simultaneously represents the whole energy system combined with the spatiotemporal and inter-annual variability of VRE. Here, we soft-link a long-term energy system model, which explores new energy system configurations from years to decades, with a high spatial and temporal resolution po wer system model that captures VRE variability from hours to years. Applying this methodology to Great Britain for 2050, we find that VRE-focused power system design is highly sensitive to the inter-annual variability of weather and that planning based on a single year can lead to operational inadequacy and failure to meet long-term decarbonization objectives. However, some insights do emerge that are relatively stable to weather-year. Reinforcement of the transmission system consistently leads to a decrease in system costs while electricity storage and flexible generation, needed to integrate VRE into the system, are generally deployed close to demand centres