Energy Management Strategies in hydrogen Smart-Grids: A laboratory experience

As microgrids gain reputation, nations are making decisions towards a new energetic paradigm where the centralized model is being abandoned in favor of a more sophisticated, reliable, environmentally friendly and decentralized one. The implementation of such sophisticated systems drive to find out new control techniques that make the system “smart”, bringing the Smart-Grid concept. This paper studies the role of Energy Management Strategies (EMSs) in hydrogen microgrids, covering both theoretical and experimental sides. It first describes the commissioning of a new labscale microgrid system to analyze a set of different EMS performance in real-life. This is followed by a summary of the approach used towards obtaining dynamic models to study and refine the different controllers implemented within this work. Then the implementation and validation of the developed EMSs using the new labscale microgrid are discussed. Experimental results are shown comparing the response of simple strategies (hysteresis band) against complex on-line optimization techniques, such as the Model Predictive Control. The difference between both approaches is extensively discussed. Results evidence how different control techniques can greatly influence the plant performance and finally we provide a set of guidelines for designing and operating Smart Grids.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad DPI2013-46912-C2-1-

Report on the Workshop on Refugee and Asylum Policy in Practice in Europe and North America

Western nations have struggled to accomplish the dual goals of refugee and asylum policies: (1) identifying and protecting Convention refugees as well as those fleeing civil conflict; and (2) controlling for abuse. The Workshop on Refugee and Asylum Policy in Practice in Europe and North America was organized to facilitate a transatlantic dialogue to explore just how well these asylum systems are balancing the dual goals. The workshop exa!llined key elements of the U.S. and European asylum systems: decision making on claims, deterrence of abuse, independent review, return of rejected asylum seekers, scope of the refugee concept, social rights and employment, international cooperation, and data and evaluation. The Workshop was convened by the Institute for the Study of International Migration (ISIM) of Georgetown University and the Center for the Study of Immigration, Integration and Citizenship Policies (CEPIC) of the Centre Nationale de Recherche Scientifique, with the support of the German Marshall Fund of the United States. It was held on July 1-3, 1999, at Oxford University. Workshop participants included government officials, scholars, and representatives from non-governmental organizations (NGOs) actively involved in analyzing and implementing refugee and asylum policies. This report outlines the major points of discussion and the areas of consensus at the Workshop, and emphasizes the issues in need of further analysis and agreement. Through this report, the Workshop seeks to encourage further discussion on refugee and asylum policies in practice in order to clarify, develop, and improve the existing mechanisms for protection

Building Civic Infrastructure: Implementing Community Partnership Grant Programmes in South Africa

This article examines recent efforts to establish Community Partnership Grant Programmes (CPG) in six South African communities. CPG programmes provide the financial and organizational infrastructure to support citizen-initiated neighbourhood projects

The valley of death, the technology pork barrel, and public support for large demonstration projects

Moving non-incremental innovations from the pilot scale to full commercial scale raises questions about the need and implementation of public support. Heuristics from the literature put policy makers in a dilemma between addressing a market failure and acknowledging a government failure: incentives for private investments in large scale demonstrations are weak (the valley of death) but the track record of governance in large demonstration projects is poor (the technology pork barrel). We reassess these arguments in the literature, particularly as to how they apply to sup- porting demonstration projects for decarbonizing industry. Conditions for the valley of death exist with: low appropriability, large chunky investments, unproven reliability, and uncertain future markets. We build a data set of 511 demonstration projects in nine technology areas and code characteristics for each project, including timing, motivations, and scale. We argue that the literature and the results from the case studies have five main implications for policy makers in making decisions about demonstration support. Policy makers should consider: 1) prioritizing learning, 2) iterative upscaling, 3) private sector engagement, 4) broad knowledge dissemination, and 5) making demand pull robust

Safety and immunogenicity of a reformulated Vietnamese bivalent killed, whole-cell, oral cholera vaccine in adults.

Vietnam currently produces an orally administered, bivalent (O1 and O139) killed whole-cell vaccine and is the only country in the world with endemic cholera to use an oral cholera vaccine in public health practice. In order to allow international use, the vaccine had to be reformulated to meet World Health Organization (WHO) requirements. We performed a randomized, placebo controlled, safety and immunogenicity studies of this reformulated vaccine among Vietnamese adults. One hundred and forty-four subjects received the two-dose regimen and 143 had two blood samples obtained for analysis. We found that this reformulated oral killed whole-cell cholera vaccine was safe, well tolerated and highly immunogenic

The Adolescent Diversion Program in New York: A Reform in Progress

This paper reviews the lessons learned from nine pilot court sites testing the Adolescent Diversion Program, which brings cases of 16- and 17-year-olds before specially trained judges, who have access to an expanded array of dispositions, including age-appropriate services. The Adolescent Diversion Program was created as a forerunner to proposed legislation that would allow courts to divert cases pre-trial and focus more effectively on the special needs of adolescent defendants

On welfare, Indiana and Michigan are proving that states canstill be ‘labs of democracy’

For more than 80 years, the U.S. states have been considered by commentators to be ‘laboratories of democracy’. Now, there is increasing concern that the states are becoming less and less likely to generate innovative policies. Looking at the growing role of federal waivers Donald F. Kettl suggests that the truth isn’t so simple. He writes that in exchange for working with the Obama administration on issues such as healthcare, conservative-led states like Indiana and Michigan have been able to push their own pathbreaking proposals to merge policy ambitions from the left with market tactics from the right