Past, present and future environmental footprint of the Danish wind turbine fleet with LCA_WIND_DK, an online interactive platform

International audienceRenewable energy systems are promoted and developed notably due to their low environmental footprint. Fleet-wide robust environmental assessments are needed to drive the sustainable transition of energy systems worldwide. This study introduces a tailored comprehensive impact assessment methodology for fleets of renewable energy systems based on Life Cycle Analysis and its application to Danish wind turbines fleet through an online platform LCA_WIND_DK (viewer.webservice-energy.org/lca-wind-dk/). This platform enables to visualize environmental performances of wind turbines in Denmark and their temporal evolution. The fleet is known in detail from 1980 to 2016 and projected from 2017 to 2030 based on national objectives for onshore/offshore capacity and pre-approved offshore projects. Each turbine's future electricity production is estimated from its power curve and geo-localized wind time-series. More than 10,000 cradle-to-grave life cycle inventories are generated, considering the spatio-temporal context and technological characteristics. The comprehensive analysis of the Danish fleet over fifty years reveals long-term trends for several impact categories. Improvements in all categories follow similar trends as in climate change, which decreases from 40 to 13 g CO2-eq/kWh between 1980 and 2030. Improvements stem from combined economies of scale and higher load factors linked to increasingly large and powerful turbines. The interactive mapping tool LCA_WIND_DK may provide statistics to support renewable energy oriented policy scenarios and unique spatio-temporal environmental information to project developers. This novel approach designed for large territories, here applied to the Danish wind turbine fleet, is generic and can be applied to other renewable energy systems and/or to other territories

The effect of price regulation on the performances of industrial symbiosis: a case study on district heating

This study of the district heating system of Aalborg (Denmark) analyses how fiscal instruments affect the extent excess heat recovery helps reduce the carbon footprint of heat. It builds on a supply-and-demand framework and characterizes the changes in excess heat supply with consequential life cycle assessment in reference to one gigajoule distributed. The heat supply curve is defined through ten scenarios, which represent incremental shares of excess heat as the constraints of the said legal instruments are lifted. The heat demand curve follows the end-users’ response to price changes. The most ambitious scenario doubles the amount of excess heat supplied and reduces the heat carbon footprint by 90% compared to current level, for an end-user price increase of 41%. The price increase results from a higher supply of excess heat at a higher price and an unchanged purchase cost from the coal-fired CHP plant despite a lower supply. This highlights the necessity of a flexible supplier when the share of recovered excess heat is high

Differential cross section measurements for the production of a W boson in association with jets in proton–proton collisions at √s = 7 TeV

Measurements are reported of differential cross sections for the production of a W boson, which decays into a muon and a neutrino, in association with jets, as a function of several variables, including the transverse momenta (pT) and pseudorapidities of the four leading jets, the scalar sum of jet transverse momenta (HT), and the difference in azimuthal angle between the directions of each jet and the muon. The data sample of pp collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 7 TeV was collected with the CMS detector at the LHC and corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 5.0 fb[superscript −1]. The measured cross sections are compared to predictions from Monte Carlo generators, MadGraph + pythia and sherpa, and to next-to-leading-order calculations from BlackHat + sherpa. The differential cross sections are found to be in agreement with the predictions, apart from the pT distributions of the leading jets at high pT values, the distributions of the HT at high-HT and low jet multiplicity, and the distribution of the difference in azimuthal angle between the leading jet and the muon at low values.United States. Dept. of EnergyNational Science Foundation (U.S.)Alfred P. Sloan Foundatio

Juxtaposing BTE and ATE – on the role of the European insurance industry in funding civil litigation

One of the ways in which legal services are financed, and indeed shaped, is through private insurance arrangement. Two contrasting types of legal expenses insurance contracts (LEI) seem to dominate in Europe: before the event (BTE) and after the event (ATE) legal expenses insurance. Notwithstanding institutional differences between different legal systems, BTE and ATE insurance arrangements may be instrumental if government policy is geared towards strengthening a market-oriented system of financing access to justice for individuals and business. At the same time, emphasizing the role of a private industry as a keeper of the gates to justice raises issues of accountability and transparency, not readily reconcilable with demands of competition. Moreover, multiple actors (clients, lawyers, courts, insurers) are involved, causing behavioural dynamics which are not easily predicted or influenced. Against this background, this paper looks into BTE and ATE arrangements by analysing the particularities of BTE and ATE arrangements currently available in some European jurisdictions and by painting a picture of their respective markets and legal contexts. This allows for some reflection on the performance of BTE and ATE providers as both financiers and keepers. Two issues emerge from the analysis that are worthy of some further reflection. Firstly, there is the problematic long-term sustainability of some ATE products. Secondly, the challenges faced by policymakers that would like to nudge consumers into voluntarily taking out BTE LEI

Penilaian Kinerja Keuangan Koperasi di Kabupaten Pelalawan

This paper describe development and financial performance of cooperative in District Pelalawan among 2007 - 2008. Studies on primary and secondary cooperative in 12 sub-districts. Method in this stady use performance measuring of productivity, efficiency, growth, liquidity, and solvability of cooperative. Productivity of cooperative in Pelalawan was highly but efficiency still low. Profit and income were highly, even liquidity of cooperative very high, and solvability was good

Search for stop and higgsino production using diphoton Higgs boson decays

Results are presented of a search for a "natural" supersymmetry scenario with gauge mediated symmetry breaking. It is assumed that only the supersymmetric partners of the top-quark (stop) and the Higgs boson (higgsino) are accessible. Events are examined in which there are two photons forming a Higgs boson candidate, and at least two b-quark jets. In 19.7 inverse femtobarns of proton-proton collision data at sqrt(s) = 8 TeV, recorded in the CMS experiment, no evidence of a signal is found and lower limits at the 95% confidence level are set, excluding the stop mass below 360 to 410 GeV, depending on the higgsino mass