Alegria: The Rise of Brazil's "Carnival of Popular Participation," Salvador da Bahia, 1950-2000s

In the second half of the twentieth century, the annual carnival in the economically depressed northeastern city of Salvador da Bahia underwent a series of transformations that brought it from relative anonymity in Brazil--where festivities in the cities of Rio de Janeiro and Recife had long been given pride of place--to the status of (inter)national showpiece in terms of cultural and entrepreneurial innovation and touristic appeal. It became a dominant factor in year-round local music production. In an era of political constraint, it appeared to embody the collective performance of multiple democracies including race and free-market consumerism. New forms of popular participation were linked to innovations in carnival that, in other national carnival sites, would have been precluded by regulation and tradition. This dissertation draws from debates and analysis in Brazil's intellectual, policy, and media spheres regarding carnival, folklore, tourism, Bahian culture, mass culture, and national identity to argue that 1) the traits of creative spontaneity and popular participation in Salvador's carnival gained prominence as both national ambivalence over "folklore" increased, and dictatorial regimes constrained political democracy; 2) the state, rather than discursively and economically controlling Salvador's carnival, has more often reacted to artistic production and market forces, its hegemony configured through strategies of support and appropriation linked to tourism and an internally amplified social ethic of alegria; and 3) media and cultural commentators have made Salvador's modern carnival a new locus for longstanding national conversations over Brazilian identity, regionalism, race, and cultural imperialism, casting its innovation as simultaneously a promising engine of renovation and a threat to both local and national traditions. Salvador carnival's progressive implications of participation and inclusion have been blunted by a process of political redemocratization that was associated with neoliberal policies at the national and local levels; its internal contradictions and commercialism have challenged both its national and local symbolic power

Economics of energy storage in a residential consumer context

With the increase of electricity tariffs and thedecreasing costs for distributed generation technologies, moreand more residential consumers are deploying local generationsystems to satisfy their electricity demand in order to reduceoverall cost. Typically, however, a mismatch between electricitygeneration and demand remains. Storage systems enableconsumers to reduce this mismatch by storing locally generatedelectricity for later consumption, instead of feeding excessgeneration into the grid. This paper analyzes the economics ofstorage installations in a residential consumer context. A linearprogram is presented to determine the optimal dispatch, andSimulated Annealing is used to identify the cost minimizingsystem configuration. The developed approach is tested for amulti-family house in Germany

Simultaneous co-integration of multiple electrical storage applications in a consumer setting

In a consumer setting, storage systems can be dispatched in order to shift surplus generation to periods when a local generation deficit exists. However, the high investment cost still makes the deployment of storage unattractive. As a way to overcome this problem existing literature looking at storage installed at the grid-level suggests dispatching the storage device for multiple applications simultaneously in order to access several value streams. Therefore, in this work, a Mixed Integer Linear Program is developed in order to schedule the operation of a storage device in a consumer context for multiple objectives in parallel. Besides shifting locally generated energy in time, the peak demand seen by the electric grid is reduced and the storage device is operated to provide primary reserve control. The model is applied in a case study based on the current German situation in order to illustrate the value contribution of stacking multiple services. When pursuing multiple applications simultaneously, the revenues of storage can be increased significantly. However, the revenues are not additive due to conflicting operations which originates a revenue gap as illustrated in the paper

Simultaneous co-integration of multiple electrical storage applications in a consumer setting

In a consumer setting, storage systems can be dispatched in order to shift surplus generation to periods when a local generation deficit exists. However, the high investment cost still makes the deployment of storage unattractive. As a way to overcome this problem existing literature looking at storage installed at the grid-level suggests dispatching the storage device for multiple applications simultaneously in order to access several value streams. Therefore, in this work, a Mixed Integer Linear Program is developed in order to schedule the operation of a storage device in a consumer context for multiple objectives in parallel. Besides shifting locally generated energy in time, the peak demand seen by the electric grid is reduced and the storage device is operated to provide primary reserve control. The model is applied in a case study based on the current German situation in order to illustrate the value contribution of stacking multiple services. When pursuing multiple applications simultaneously, the revenues of storage can be increased significantly. However, the revenues are not additive due to conflicting operations which originates a revenue gap as illustrated in the paper

Evaluation of the impact of storage systems on grid electricity demand in the German context

This paper analyzes the impact of storageinstallations on grid electricity demand. Storage systems allowthe decoupling of consumption from electricity generation andtherefore have the potential to change the daily demand profileseen by the network in a significant way. This has far reachingconsequences for many stakeholders, as changes in the netdemand would for example impact electricity prices or changethe requirements for peak generation. The developed approachconsiders the installation of storage devices to increase self consumption of locally generated electricity in a residential andsmall commercial end users context as well as its application forelectricity arbitrage. Assumptions about their implementationon a system level are described and their impact on overallelectricity demand is determined considering the German case

A dynamical trichotomy for structured populations experiencing positive density-dependence in stochastic environments

Positive density-dependence occurs when individuals experience increased survivorship, growth, or reproduction with increased population densities. Mechanisms leading to these positive relationships include mate limitation, saturating predation risk, and cooperative breeding and foraging. Individuals within these populations may differ in age, size, or geographic location and thereby structure these populations. Here, I study structured population models accounting for positive density-dependence and environmental stochasticity i.e. random fluctuations in the demographic rates of the population. Under an accessibility assumption (roughly, stochastic fluctuations can lead to populations getting small and large), these models are shown to exhibit a dynamical trichotomy: (i) for all initial conditions, the population goes asymptotically extinct with probability one, (ii) for all positive initial conditions, the population persists and asymptotically exhibits unbounded growth, and (iii) for all positive initial conditions, there is a positive probability of asymptotic extinction and a complementary positive probability of unbounded growth. The main results are illustrated with applications to spatially structured populations with an Allee effect and age-structured populations experiencing mate limitation