"How much is enough?" Determining adequate levels of environmental compensation for wind power impacts using equivalency analysis

Environmental considerations at wind power developments require avoidance and mitigation of environmental impacts through proper citing, operational constraints, etc. However, some impacts are unavoidable for otherwise socially-beneficial projects. Criteria for Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) suggest that compensation be provided for unavoidable or residual impacts on species and/or habitat from wind power development. Current environmental compensation schemes for wind power fail to demonstrate a connection between the expected ecological damage and the ecological gains through restoration. The EU-funded REMEDE project developed quantitative methods known as "equivalency analysis" to assist Member States in implementing EU Directives that require scaling of environmental compensation. This study provides a transparent framework for estimating compensation at wind facilities based on the REMEDE approach. I illustrate the approach with a hypothetical case study involving sea eagle impacts at the Smøla Wind Farm (Norway). This study assumes measures be will implemented to alleviate future impacts on the eagle population but that an interim loss of resources to the public remains. I illustrate how one could quantify the damage (debit) from sea eagle turbine collisions. A potentially-promising compensatory project that reduces eagle mortality from power line electrocution is suggested to generate the environmental gains (credit), which is quantified using hypothetical data. Pending completion of on-going research, this framework could be applied with actual data to inform future compensation at Smøla. The framework is generalizable to on- and off-shore wind development but requires targeted and thoughtful data collection. Importantly, compensation should not be used disingenuously to justify otherwise environmentally costly projects

Wind power compensation is not for the birds : an opinion from an environmental economist

This article advocates for better implementation of the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) framework as applied to wind power development, with a particular focus on improving compensatory restoration scaling. If properly enforced, the environmental impacts hierarchy "avoid - minimize - compensate" provides the regulated community with incentives to prevent wildlife and habitat impacts in sensitive areas and, if necessary, compensate for residual impacts through restoration or conservation projects. Given the increase in legislation requiring resource-based environmental compensation, methods for scaling an appropriate quantity and quality of resources is of increasing relevance. I argue that Equivalency Analysis (EA) represents a transparent and quantitative approach for scaling compensation in the case of wind power development. Herein, I identify the economic underpinnings of environmental compensation legislation and identify weaknesses in current scaling approaches within wind power development. I demonstrate how the recently-completed REMEDE Toolkit, which provides guidance on EA, can inform an improved scaling approach and summarize a case study involving raptor collisions with turbines that illustrates the EA approach. Finally, I stress the need for further contributions from the field of restoration ecology. The success of ex ante compensation in internalizing the environmental costs of wind development depends on the effective implementation of the environmental impacts hierarchy, which must effectively encourage avoidance and minimization over environmental restoration and repair

”How much is enough?” Determining Adequate Levels of Environmental Compensation for Wind Power Impacts using Equivalency Analysis: An Illustrative & Hypothetical Case Study of Sea Eagle Impacts at the Smøla Wind Farm, Norway

Environmental considerations at wind power require avoidance and mitigation of environmental impacts through proper citing, operational constraints, etc. However, some impacts are unavoidable for otherwise socially-beneficial projects. Criteria for Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) suggest that compensation be provided for unavoidable or residual impacts on species and/or habitat from wind power development. Current environmental compensation schemes for wind power fail to demonstrate a connection between the expected ecological damage and the ecological gains through restoration. The EU-funded REMEDE project developed quantitative methods known as "equivalency analysis" to assist in scaling environmental compensation. This study provides a framework for estimating compensation at wind facilities based on the REMEDE approach. I illustrate the approach with a hypothetical case study involving sea eagle impacts at the Smøla Wind Farm (Norway). I quantify the damage (debit) from sea eagle turbine collisions and scale a compensatory project (credit) that reduces eagle mortality from power line electrocution, which is quantified using hypothetical data. The framework is generalizable to on- and off-shore wind development but requires targeted and thoughtful data collection. Importantly, compensation should not be used disingenuously to justify otherwise environmentally costly projects.Equivalency Analysis; environmental compensation; wind power

Climate Policy Measures: What do people prefer ?

Several countries are responding to the climate change threat with various policy measures (e.g., taxes, permit trading, regulations, information campaigns, etc). While the effectiveness of different measures (instruments) has been studied extensively, very little research exists related to public preferences for alternative measures. This paper describes the results of a pilot study to determine whether a choice experiment might be a feasible approach for measuring preferences for carbon dioxide reduction policies, while ensuring careful consideration of the budget constraint facing households. We focus on estimating the public’s marginal utilities and implicit prices for a select group of attributes that describe climate policy measures in general. The results from the pilot study indicate that when respondents trade-off the cost of alternative and unlabeled policy measures, they are willing to pay for those that encourage (1) the development of environmentally-friendly technology and (2) climate awareness among the Swedish population. Finding (1) could be interpreted to mean public support for market-based measures (e.g., taxes and permit trading) while finding (2) seems to support the use of information in the design of climate policy measures in order to encourage carbon dioxide-reducing behavior. Finally, our pilot study assumed that respondents’ preferences for the cost-sharing burden (equity) of measures might be defined in terms of an individual’s ability to pay. Given this assumption, our results indicate weak preferences for non-regressive cost distribution, but progressive cost distribution had no effect on choice. We offer several possible conclusions from this preliminary investigation into climate policy preferences.market-based mechanisms; information effects; equity; choice experiment; preferences

The REMEDE Project: A useful framework for assessing non-market damages from oil spills?

As vessel traffic in the Baltic increases, in particular oil transports from Russia to the international market, so too does the risk of oil spills which above the environmental impacts impose costs on society including direct costs, market costs and non-market costs (e.g., losses in welfare from a damaged environment not easily valued in a market). While financial compensation addresses direct and market costs, environmental compensation (compensatory restoration) offsets welfare declines from the loss of resources or the services they provide. Although a clear international system for recovering environmental restoration costs from oil spills is still un-established, the EU's Environmental Liability Directive (ELD) from 2007 introduces a number of useful terms and concepts that may be applicable in the Baltic context. The European Commission (EC) funded development of the REMEDE Toolkit to help Member States carry out the ELD requirements. The Toolkit provides a useful framework for assessing non-market costs associated with oil spill damages by defining the types of ecological losses suffered by the public and providing interdisciplinary methods for scaling resource-based compensation projects whose cost should be incurred by the responsible polluter(s). This paper suggests that the ELD concepts and REMEDE methods could be transferred to the Baltic to help authorities recover environmental restoration costs from responsible polluters. We illustrate application of REMEDE-like concepts and methods to oil spill damages in the context of US regulations and the UN Compensation Commission and discuss the legal acceptance of these methods. The fact that the ELD cannot legally be invoked to address an oil spill in Europe should not preclude a discussion about how these relatively new European legal concepts, including the REMEDE methodology, could be used to establish a more consistent, transparent, and replicable framework for damage assessment in the sensitive marine environment of the Baltic Sea.Equivalency Analysis; Baltic Sea; environmental valuation; Environmental Liability Directive; environmental compensation

A multiarchitecture parallel-processing development environment

A description is given of the hardware and software of a multiprocessor test bed - the second generation Hypercluster system. The Hypercluster architecture consists of a standard hypercube distributed-memory topology, with multiprocessor shared-memory nodes. By using standard, off-the-shelf hardware, the system can be upgraded to use rapidly improving computer technology. The Hypercluster's multiarchitecture nature makes it suitable for researching parallel algorithms in computational field simulation applications (e.g., computational fluid dynamics). The dedicated test-bed environment of the Hypercluster and its custom-built software allows experiments with various parallel-processing concepts such as message passing algorithms, debugging tools, and computational 'steering'. Such research would be difficult, if not impossible, to achieve on shared, commercial systems

The Rise and Fall of Patent Law Uniformity and the Need for a Congressional Response

Congress established the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals a quarter century ago to create uniformity in the field of patent law. By significantly limiting the appellate jurisdiction of the Federal Circuit in patent related cases, the recent decision of Holmes v. Vornado in the United States Supreme Court makes this goal an impossibility. This Article addresses the purposes of uniformity in patent law, the ramifications of the limited jurisdiction of the Federal Circuit, and concludes with a proposed Congressional response designed to withstand a future appeal to the Supreme Court

Environmental compensation is not for the birds

The European Union (EU) recently implemented the Environmental Liability Directive (ELD), requiring that environmental damage be restored so that the affected environment returns to (or toward) its baseline condition and the public is compensated for the initial damage and the losses during the time it takes for the environment to recover (interim losses). Equivalency Analysis (EA) represents a method for scaling environmental compensation to offset interim losses. Ensuring appropriate compensation for resource loss requires a merging of ecological measurement with the theories of welfare economics. This thesis explores some of the issues in scaling resource-based compensation in three papers. Paper I is a quantitative application of the EA method to compensate for sea eagle mortality from wind turbine collisions. It is co-authored with a biologist and proposes a new and innovative compensatory measure based on electrocution prevention on power lines. Paper II is written for an ecological readership and communicates fundamental economic assumptions in a way that might be helpful for cross-discipline collaboration. The main contribution is to clarify that the underlying goal of environmental compensation should be "no net loss of welfare." Paper III scrutinizes the conventional EA method from a social efficiency perspective, suggesting that the focus on equity for the victim may preclude a socially optimal compensatory outcome. The overarching conclusion is that EA fails to inform policy makers of the inescapable environmental trade-offs that arise in compensating environmental losses

Soliton crystals in Kerr resonators

Strongly interacting solitons confined to an optical resonator would offer unique capabilities for experiments in communication, computation, and sensing with light. Here we report on the discovery of soliton crystals in monolithic Kerr microresonators-spontaneously and collectively ordered ensembles of co-propagating solitons whose interactions discretize their allowed temporal separations. We unambiguously identify and characterize soliton crystals through analysis of their 'fingerprint' optical spectra, which arise from spectral interference between the solitons. We identify a rich space of soliton crystals exhibiting crystallographic defects, and time-domain measurements directly confirm our inference of their crystal structure. The crystallization we observe is explained by long-range soliton interactions mediated by resonator mode degeneracies, and we probe the qualitative difference between soliton crystals and a soliton liquid that forms in the absence of these interactions. Our work explores the rich physics of monolithic Kerr resonators in a new regime of dense soliton occupation and offers a way to greatly increase the efficiency of Kerr combs; further, the extreme degeneracy of the configuration space of soliton crystals suggests an implementation for a robust on-chip optical buffer