Resilient energy landscapes:A spatial quest?

The past decade has seen a swift increase in societal and political commitment to shift towards a more sustainable energy system. This commitment is confirmed by European Union Climate and Energy targets (CEC, 2010). Among the prime means to accommodate such a shift is the increased use of renewables in the energy mix, which the European Union has set at a twenty percent share in 2020. The use of renewables will have vast spatial implications. Fossil fuels are often found below the surface and transported to centralised units to produce electricity or the distribution of fuels. Renewables such as wind, solar or hydropower are often above the surface, highly visible and require vast amounts of space. Hence, we will have to accept energy production becoming an increasingly prominent part of our landscapes.</p

New interaction paths in the energy landscape: the role of local energy initiatives

Energy transition is an encompassing process which not only involves the energy system but also the landscape in which the energy system is embedded. Renewable energy is triggering new interactions with local landscapes in physical, socio-economic and institutional senses. We capture these interactions using the energy landscape concept, which expresses the interdependence of the energy system with the landscape. We aim to understand whether and how local energy initiatives facilitate this interdependency so as to see if local energy initiatives can be considered focal points in energy transition. We analyse how emerging local energy initiatives link different interests, land uses and activities within their energy practices and show how these facilitate interactions between various physical and social systems across multiple spatial scales. The paper concludes with several suggestions on how spatial planners and policy-makers can use the insights from the findings to support energy transition

An area-based research approach to energy transition

While at first glance energy transition is a technical and financial challenge focused on investments in innovative low carbon technologies and initiatives that increase energy saving and renewable energy production, the actual challenge of pursuing a sustainable energy system is multifaceted. To contribute to energy transition, innovative low carbon practices must be linked to communities, economies, ecosystems, infrastructure and governance systems. Initiatives using innovative practices that create and activate links with multiple systems and scales in their spatial contexts can engender co-adaptive and co- evolutionary innovation processes starting from the bottom-up. To improve our ability to interpret such transition phenomena, this thesis first develops an area-based research approach as a starting point for the study of energy transition and, second, it uses this approach to interpret the contribution of local energy initiatives to energy transition. The area-based research approach facilitates the identification of context-sensitive explanations for temporal transition phenomena. The approach combines perspectives from spatial planning (area-based planning) and transitions research (complex systems; multilevel perspective on innovation) into an interdisciplinary framework. This results in an innovative research method, with artefact-actor networks mapped onto graphic representations of energy landscapes. The empirical research findings demonstrate four ways in which local energy initiatives change the energy landscape and thereby contribute to energy transition. The findings of this thesis suggest that existing and emerging democratic area-based institutional structures can support the integration of innovative low carbon practices within the energy landscape and, by doing so, generate integrated energy landscapes

The adaptation of Dutch energy policy to emerging area-based energy practices

This paper sheds a light on how local conditions affect renewable energy innovation. As empirical case, we study an energy transition policy regulation in the Netherlands: the zip code-rose regulation (PCR) intended for community energy initiatives. Firstly, we analyse the capacity of the PCR to facilitate the accommodation of renewable energy projects by community energy initiatives. Secondly, we analyse how emerging area-based energy practices are feeding back into the energy policy system. Based on empirical evidence from a desk study and interviews with community energy initiatives and key governance actors we find that the policy does provide a modest incentive for initiatives to develop renewable energy projects under local conditions. Nevertheless, the policy falls short of allowing initiatives to openly seek for locally desired solutions and hence, to increase opportunities at a local level to develop projects based on local conditions. However, current difficulties with the policy are being considered at a national level urging for adaptation of Dutch energy policies

Beyond the Brim of the Hat: Kinematics of Globular Clusters out to Large Radius in the Sombrero Galaxy

We have obtained radial velocity measurements for 51 new globular clusters around the Sombrero galaxy. These measurements were obtained using spectroscopic observations from the AAOmega spectrograph on the Anglo-Australian Telescope and the Hydra spectrograph at WIYN. Combined with our own past measurements and velocity measurements obtained from the literature we have constructed a large database of radial velocities that contains a total of 360 confirmed globular clusters. Previous studies' analyses of the kinematics and mass profile of the Sombrero globular cluster system have been constrained to the inner ~9' (~24 kpc or ~5 effective radii), but our new measurements have increased the radial coverage of the data, allowing us to determine the kinematic properties of M104 out to ~15' (~41 kpc or ~9 effective radii). We use our set of radial velocities to study the GC system kinematics and to determine the mass profile and V-band mass-to-light profile of the galaxy. We find that the V-band mass-to-light ratio increases from 4.5 at the center to a value of 20.9 at 41 kpc (~9 effective radii or 15'), which implies that the dark matter halo extends to the edge of our available data set. We compare our mass profile at 20 kpc (~4 effective radii or ~7.4') to the mass computed from x-ray data and find good agreement. We also use our data to look for rotation in the globular cluster system as a whole, as well as in the red and blue subpopulations. We find no evidence for significant rotation in any of these samples.Comment: Accepted for publication in the Astronomical Journal; 23 pages, 14 figures, and 2 table

Auditory attention causes gain enhancement and frequency sharpening at successive stages of cortical processing: evidence from human EEG

Previous findings have suggested that auditory attention causes not only enhancement in neural processing gain, but also sharpening in neural frequency tuning in human auditory cortex. The current study was aimed to reexamine these findings, and investigate whether attentional gain enhancement and frequency sharpening emerge at the same or different processing levels, and whether they represent independent or cooperative effects. For that, we examined the pattern of attentional modulation effects on early, sensory-driven cortical auditory-evoked potentials (CAEPs) occurring at different latencies. Attention was manipulated using a dichotic listening task and was thus not selectively directed to specific frequency values. Possible attention-related changes in frequency tuning selectivity were measured with an EEG adaptation paradigm. Our results show marked disparities in attention effects between the earlier N1 CAEP deflection and the subsequent P2 deflection, with the N1 showing a strong gain enhancement effect, but no sharpening, and the P2 showing clear evidence of sharpening, but no independent gain effect. They suggest that gain enhancement and frequency sharpening represent successive stages of a cooperative attentional modulation mechanism, which appears to increase the representational bandwidth of attended versus unattended sounds

Is off-frequency overshoot caused by adaptation of suppression?

This study is concerned with the mechanism of off-frequency overshoot. Overshoot refers to the phenomenon whereby a brief signal presented at the onset of a masker is easier to detect when the masker is preceded by a “precursor” sound (which is often the same as the masker). Overshoot is most prominent when the masker and precursor have a different frequency than the signal (henceforth referred to as “off-frequency overshoot”). It has been suggested that off-frequency overshoot is based on a similar mechanism as “enhancement,” which refers to the perceptual pop-out of a signal after presentation of a precursor that contains a spectral notch at the signal frequency; both have been proposed to be caused by a reduction in the suppressive masking of the signal as a result of the adaptive effect of the precursor (“adaptation of suppression”). In this study, we measured overshoot, suppression, and adaptation of suppression for a 4-kHz sinusoidal signal and a 4.75-kHz sinusoidal masker and precursor, using the same set of participants. We show that, while the precursor yielded strong overshoot and the masker produced strong suppression, the precursor did not appear to cause any reduction (adaptation) of suppression. Predictions based on an established model of the cochlear input–output function indicate that our failure to obtain any adaptation of suppression is unlikely to represent a false negative outcome. Our results indicate that off-frequency overshoot and enhancement are likely caused by different mechanisms. We argue that overshoot may be due to higher-order perceptual factors such as transient masking or attentional diversion, whereas enhancement may be based on mechanisms similar to those that generate the Zwicker tone

Skilled Labor Shortages May Lead to Wage Inflation

In Boise there has been a growing demand for high skilled labor that is not being met, leading to rising wages for jobs that require those skills. Our objective is to research which high skill position jobs in the City of Boise are seeing higher than average annual wage growth. This information will give us more insight as to why, despite the rising wages, not enough high skilled labor is being supplied in order to meet the demand for certain jobs. We hope the City of Boise will be able to use our research to attract high skilled workers in local industries where they are lacking. Through the direction of a Boise Job Recruiter we will focus our research on several specific skilled position jobs that are seeing higher wage increases than average. Basic information will be gathered through various websites such as clustermapping.us, bls.gov, and others. More detailed information will be obtained via email, phone calls, and in-person meetings with various companies who are seeing this lack of skilled work being filled. We will be contacting several large companies in the City of Boise that employ skilled workers in order to learn more about their current wages compared to typical wage growth. We are also expecting to learn which skilled jobs in Boise are seeing higher wage increases and the economic reasoning behind these increases compared to typical wage growth