Market strategies for offshore wind in Europe: A development and diffusion perspective

AbstractOffshore wind will contribute to the decarbonization of European power systems, but is currently costlier than many other generation technologies. We assess the adequacy of market strategies available to private actors developing offshore wind farms in Europe, by employing the development and diffusion pattern model. The model includes two earlier phases in addition to the large-scale deployment phase of other diffusion models: the innovation and the market adaptation phases. During its development and diffusion offshore wind moved from experimentation to a dominant design (monopile foundations and a permanent magnet generator). Simultaneously, wind farms shifted from an experimental to a commercial purpose and grew from 10 to 316MW on average. The turbine and wind farm development markets kept a high concentration throughout all phases. Also, the wind farm life cycle and supply chain became more integrated and drew less from the onshore wind and oil & gas sectors.This development and diffusion was shaped by the barriers of cost, project risk and complexity, capital requirements, and multi-disciplinarity. Wind farms developers combined three niche strategies to address these barriers: the subsidized, the geographic, and the demo, experiment and develop. The barriers make these niche strategies more adequate than strategies of mass-market (dominating a market) or wait-and-see (developing resources but waiting for uncertainty reduction before market entrance). Nonetheless, the barriers and market strategies changed during the development and diffusion pattern. Thus, cost and risk reductions decreased the importance of the subsidized niche, while the geographic niche becomes less important as offshore wind develops outside of Europe.The study also identified an increase in cooperation for wind farm development, as development became more international and with more frequent alliances. Wind farm developers and development and diffusion models research must consider how contemporary forms of cooperation improve or hinder the market strategies

Short-term strategies for Dutch wind power producers to reduce imbalance costs

The paper assesses bidding strategies for a wind power producer in the Netherlands. To this end, a three-stage stochastic optimization framework is used, maximizing wind power producer's profit using the day-ahead and cross-border intraday market, taking into account available interconnection capacity. Results show that the wind power producer can increase its profits by trading on the intraday market and – under certain imbalance prices – by intentionally creating imbalances. It has been considered uncertainties about prices, power forecast and interconnection capacity at the day-ahead and intraday timeframes

Risk based framework for assessing resilience in a complex multi-actor supply chain domain

Risk management frameworks offer excellent tools to identify and manage risks in supply chains. Existing tools can be used to evaluate impacts of countermeasures, however, analysts struggle with modelling how disruptions escalate in complex supply chain systems within a certain amount of time and across several stakeholders. On the contrary, the resilience discipline offers the possibility to understand how a supply chain reacts to disruptions as a function of time. Hence, this paper integrates the concepts of resilience with risk management techniques and develops a risk based resilience assessment framework in a multi-actor context. Further, the framework is operationalized by developing a computer based tool that is tested in case of fruit import in Netherlands.QC 20190111</p

Energetic communities for community energy : a review of key issues and trends shaping integrated community energy systems

Energy systems across the globe are going through a radical transformation as a result of technological and institutional changes, depletion of fossil fuel resources, and climate change. At the local level, increasing distributed energy resources requires that the centralized energy systems be re-organized. In this paper, the concept of Integrated community energy systems (ICESs) is presented as a modern development to re-organize local energy systems to integrate distributed energy resources and engage local communities. Local energy systems such as ICESs not only ensure self-provision of energy but also provide essential system services to the larger energy system. In this regard, a comparison of different energy system integration option is provided. We review the current energy trends and the associated technological, socio-economic, environmental and institutional issues shaping the development of ICESs. These systems can be applied to both developed and developing countries, however, their objectives, business models as well as composition differs. ICESs can be accepted by different actors such as local governments, communities, energy suppliers and system operators as an effective means to achieve sustainability and thereby will have significant roles in future energy systems

Community energy storage: Governance and business models

The decreasing costs of distributed energy resources and increasing need for flexibility have attracted the attention of many in community energy storage (CES) business. CES, however, is a complex sociotechnical system with a variety of technologies, actors, and interactions. In the changing energy landscape, two pathways for CES, namely, local and virtual, are prominent. The range of technical, economic, environmental, and institutional values differ in these pathways. This chapter analyzes business models of multivalue and multiactor CES and provides recommendations for enabling regulatory and governance conditions

Glutamine Synthetase in Muscle Is Required for Glutamine Production during Fasting and Extrahepatic Ammonia Detoxification*

The main endogenous source of glutamine is de novo synthesis in striated muscle via the enzyme glutamine synthetase (GS). The mice in which GS is selectively but completely eliminated from striated muscle with the Cre-loxP strategy (GS-KO/M mice) are, nevertheless, healthy and fertile. Compared with controls, the circulating concentration and net production of glutamine across the hindquarter were not different in fed GS-KO/M mice. Only a ∼3-fold higher escape of ammonia revealed the absence of GS in muscle. However, after 20 h of fasting, GS-KO/M mice were not able to mount the ∼4-fold increase in glutamine production across the hindquarter that was observed in control mice. Instead, muscle ammonia production was ∼5-fold higher than in control mice. The fasting-induced metabolic changes were transient and had returned to fed levels at 36 h of fasting. Glucose consumption and lactate and ketone-body production were similar in GS-KO/M and control mice. Challenging GS-KO/M and control mice with intravenous ammonia in stepwise increments revealed that normal muscle can detoxify ∼2.5 μmol ammonia/g muscle·h in a muscle GS-dependent manner, with simultaneous accumulation of urea, whereas GS-KO/M mice responded with accumulation of glutamine and other amino acids but not urea. These findings demonstrate that GS in muscle is dispensable in fed mice but plays a key role in mounting the adaptive response to fasting by transiently facilitating the production of glutamine. Furthermore, muscle GS contributes to ammonia detoxification and urea synthesis. These functions are apparently not vital as long as other organs function normally