Tradable Green Certificates as a Policy Instrument? A Discussion on the Case of Poland

Quota obligation schemes based on tradable green certificates have become a popular policy instrument to expand power generation from renewable energy sources (RES). Their application, however, can neither be justified as a first-best response to a market failure, nor, in a second-best sense, as an instrument mitigating distortionary effects of the emissions externality, if an emissions trading system exists that fully covers the energy industry. We study how ancillary reasons, in form of overcoming various barriers for RES use and establishing beneficial side-effects, such as industry development, energy security, and abatement of pollutants not covered under the ETS, apply to the scheme recently introduced in Poland. While setting substantial expansion incentives, an advantage for local industry or job-market development or energy security can hardly be seen. With rising power prices for end consumers and awareness that the extra rents from the schemes mostly accrue to foreign investors and renewable and polluting generators, we expect a negative impact on social acceptance for RES and RES deployment support policies.tradable green certificates, environmental policy, Poland, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

White Brotherhood and Delphic Idea: Esoteric religiosity in Bulgaria and Greece in the first half of the 20th century

In der krisenhaften Situation der Zwischenkriegszeit treten in Südosteuropa zwei Männer mit messianischem Sendungsbewusstsein in Erscheinung: der bulgarische Theologe Petăr Dănov (1864–1944) und der griechische Literat Angelos Sikelianos (1884–1951). Beide proklamieren den Anbruch eines künftigen Zeitalters der Liebe, des Friedens und der Harmonie, wobei sie ihren jeweiligen Völkern eine zentrale Rolle im Hinblick auf die dafür nötige „Erleuchtung“ und Höherentwicklung der Menschheit zuschreiben. In Bulgarien formiert sich die von Dănov gegründete religiöse Bewegung Weiße Bruderschaft als Vorhut der verkündeten neuen Ära; in Griechenland wirbt Sikelianos für seine Delphischen Idee, der zufolge ein internationales spirituelles Zentrum in Delphi den Grundstein für die Erlösung der Welt legen soll. Im Rahmen dieser Dissertation untersuche ich die beiden Phänomene in vergleichender Perspektive als Manifestationen esoterischer Religiosität, d.h. als Teil einer ideen- und religionsgeschichtlichen longue durée neoplatonisch-gnostisch-hermetisch geprägten Denkens und Handelns. Von besonderem Interesse ist dabei zum einen die Frage, wie die beiden Protagonisten versuchen, soziale Anerkennung für ihre (esoteriktypischen) Ansprüche auf ein höheres Wissen über den Kosmos sowie die daraus abgeleiteten millenaristischen Visionen zu erlangen und Anhänger bzw. Unterstützer zu mobilisieren. Des Weiteren beleuchte ich die Positionierung der Vertreter esoterischer Religiosität gegenüber den Orthodoxen Kirchen als den dominanten religiösen Institutionen der Region wie auch, umgekehrt, die kirchliche Kritik an den Esoterikern. Eine dritte vergleichend-analytische Betrachtung gilt den visuellen und ästhetischen Aspekten (Rituale, Inszenierungen) von Weißer Bruderschaft und Delphischer Idee, die ich in den länder-übergreifenden historischen Kontext einordne.This dissertation examines two manifestations of esoteric religiosity in the first half of the 20th century: the White Brotherhood movement in Bulgaria, founded by theologian Petăr Dănov (1864–1944), and the so-called Delphic Idea propagated by Greek poet Angelos Sikelianos (1884–1951). Both men proclaim the dawn of a new age of peace and harmony after World War I, and attribute crucial roles to the Bulgarian and Greek peoples concerning mankind’s spiritual awakening and unification. These millenarian messages are based on claims of higher knowledge about the cosmos typical for esotericism in general; the first part of my comparative analysis is therefore a look at the strategies applied by Dănov and Sikelianos in order to gain social legitimacy for their claims and visions and thus to attract adherents and supporters. Secondly, I juxtapose the essential traits of esoteric religiosity with the main characteristics of institutional Christianity, and use this conceptual framework to shed light on the mutual perception of the two esoteric movements and the dominant Greek and Bulgarian Orthodox Churches. Thirdly, a comparison will be drawn between the respective visual and aesthetic aspects of the White Brotherhood and the Delphic Idea

Mesoscopic Electronics in Solid State Nanostructures

This text treats electronic transport in the regime where conventional textbook models are no longer applicable, including the effect of electronic phase coherence, energy quantization and single-electron charging. This second edition is completely updated and expanded, and now comprises new chapters on spin electronics and quantum information processing, transport in inhomogeneous magnetic fields, organic/molecular electronics, and applications of field effect transistors. The book also provides an overview of semiconductor processing technologies and experimental techniques. With a number ofThomas Heinzel received his Ph.D. from the University of Munich in 1994. He subsequently joined the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, for two years. From 1996 to 2001, he worked at the ETH Zurich, where he received his habilitation. From 2001 to 2004, Professor Heinzel held a professorship in experimental physics at the University of Freiburg, after which he accepted a post as professor of experimental physics of condensed matter at the University of Düsseldorf, both in Germany. His current research interests are electrons in nanostructured as well as in self-organized materials

Transport properties of a quantum wire: the role of extended time-dependent impurities

We study the transport properties of a quantum wire, described by the Tomonaga-Luttinger model, in the presence of a backscattering potential provided by several extended time-dependent impurities (barriers). Employing the B\" uttiker-Landauer approach, we first consider the scattering of noninteracting electrons ($g=1$) by a rectangular-like barrier and find an exact solution for the backscattering current, as well as a perturbative solution for a weak static potential with an arbitrary shape. We then include electron-electron interactions and use the Keldysh formalism combined with the bosonization technique to study oscillating extended barriers. We show that the backscattering current off time-dependent impurities can be expressed in terms of the current for the corresponding static barrier. Then we determine the backscattering current for a static extended potential, which, in the limit of noninteracting electrons ($g=1$), coincides with the result obtained using the B\" uttiker-Landauer formalism. In particular, we find that the conductance can be increased beyond its quantized value in the whole range of repulsive interactions $0<g<1$ already in the case of a single oscillating extended impurity, in contrast %contrary to the case of a point-like impurity, where this phenomenon occurs only for $0<g<1/2$.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figure

Impurity and edge roughness scattering in armchair graphene nanoribbons: Boltzmann approach

The conductivity of armchair graphene nanoribbons in the presence of short-range impurities and edge roughness is studied theoretically using the Boltzmann transport equation for quasi-one-dimensional systems. As the number of occupied subbands increases, the conductivity due to short-range impurities converges towards the two-dimensional case. Calculations of the magnetoconductivity confirm the edge-roughness-induced dips at cyclotron radii close to the ribbon width suggested by the recent quantum simulations