Bioenergy Entrepreneurship in Rural China

The Chinese Central Government has made the promotion of industrial utilization of bioenergy one of the priorities in the national plans on renewable energy. However, there is a general lack of understanding on how bioenergy entrepreneurship works on the ground level in China, particularly in rural areas. This thesis therefore aims to investigate the emergence and development of rural bioenergy business in China, and to identify and evaluate the key factors and enabling conditions for bioenergy systems. The research is based on three empirical case studies and interviews with key stakeholders; it finds that the individual innovation from primary movers can become a major motivation to initiate rural bioenergy business, and this innovation is derived from primary movers ambitious and personal value judgment. During the system development, local networks play a critical role to formulate business strategies. One of the key market advantages of rural bioenergy business is the naturally ready local networks in rural China, given the inherent close relationship inside the village system, which works effectively to activate relevant actors and integrate resources. Given these attributes, the internal primary movers are more likely to bring positive performance than external primary movers. A joint force of internal and external actors is also promising in terms of performance, when the internal actors take the leading role. The research highlights three conceptualized development mechanisms of rural bioenergy that have been derived from the empirical cases. They include environmental oriented development, social welfare oriented development and entrepreneurial oriented development. The three mechanisms start with different entrepreneurs orientations with the focus on environmental protection, social welfare improvement and innovative business development, and bring out different system outcomes based on value-creation consideration. The enabling solutions for the development of rural bioenergy business therefore require comprehensive institutional improvement, including enhanced supportive policies, and various education, information sharing facilitations

Meson and Baryon dispersion relations with Brillouin fermions

We study the dispersion relations of mesons and baryons built from Brillouin quarks on one N_f=2 gauge ensemble provided by QCDSF. For quark masses up to the physical strange quark mass, there is hardly any improvement over the Wilson discretization, if either action is link-smeared and tree-level clover improved. For quark masses in the range of the physical charm quark mass, the Brillouin action still shows a perfect relativistic behavior, while the Wilson action induces severe cut-off effects. As an application we determine the masses of the \Omega_c^0, \Omega_{cc}^+ and \Omega_{ccc}^{++} baryons on that ensemble.Comment: 16 pages, 9 figures, 4 tables; v2: one Reference added, matches published versio