This book highlights recent advances in the identification, prediction and exploitation of demand side (DS) flexibility and investigates new methods of predicting DS flexibility at various different power system (PS) levels. Renewable energy sources (RES) are characterized by volatile, partially unpredictable and mostly non-dispatchable generation. The main challenge in terms of integrating RES into power systems is their intermittency, which negatively affects the power balance. Addressing this challenge requires an increase in the available PS flexibility, which in turn requires accurate estimation of the available flexibility on the DS and aggregation solutions at the system level. This book discusses these issues and presents solutions for effectively tackling them.

The construction of utility infrastructure requires meticulous, long-term planning from both an economic and legal perspective. Recent changes in energy policy aimed at promoting renewables have placed even greater focus on utility infrastructure planning. This book takes current developments as a starting point for an exhaustive overview of the legal environment in utility planning. While specific attention is devoted the the latest developments in the energy sector (NABEG, EnLAG), other types of relevant infrastructure (roads, pipelines, and so on) also receive due treatment.

This publication has been produced as part of the IAEA's Modelling and Data for Radiological Impact Assessments (MODARIA) programme. It summarizes the activities of Working Group 7, which was one of ten working groups within MODARIA, and focused on the harmonization and intercomparison of models for the accidental release of tritium to the atmosphere. It addresses the modelling of tritium into the atmosphere and the subsequent terrestrial processes that determine the dynamic transfer of tritium in the environment. The first half of the report contains a literature review regarding state-of-the-art modelling of tritium in the terrestrial environment. The second half summarizes the results of an intercomparison exercise undertaken using four models to inform the direction of future research.

This book takes a fresh look at pricing, product differentiation and the need for decommoditisation in market sectors where products and services are standardised and interchangeable. In the first chapters the book explains what commodities are, and puts them into a historical perspective to promote an understanding of their production and its effects. From this baseline the book then presents a case study on how decommoditisation has progressed within the energy industry. Building on this case study and learnings from other sectors, it develops a theoretical framework, characterising the processes and mechanisms observed to be extended towards different industries. This framework is then utilised in the following chapters as a model to explain the progression of decommoditisation, and to examine other sectors through this lens. To conclude, the book presents the implications for stakeholders and suggestions on how to respond to them from a policy and business standpoint. In a final chapter the book develops an outlook on current trends and possible alternative pathways, and summarizes the main takeaways for management professionals and policymakers alike.

This book critically engages with a long tradition of scholarly work that conceives of the European Union as a peculiar international actor that pursues a value-based, normatively oriented and development-friendly agenda in its relations with international partners. The EU is a pivotal player in international trade relations, holding formidable power in trade but also exercising substantial power through trade. Trade policy therefore represents a strategic field for the EU to shape its image as a healthy economy and a global power. In this field, the EU has declared a twofold ambitious goal, namely that of fostering economic growth in Europe while, at the same time, promoting development and growth abroad, both in developed and developing countries. In other words, the EU aims to increase its competitiveness in world trade while acting as an ethical and normative power. Here, Poletti and Sicurelli explore the tension between these two roles.

This book brings together contributions from experts in water management, scientists, researchers, academics and lecturers, sharing experiences and successes in this field. It is devoted to a wide range of water resources management issues, including water quality to water quantity, considering all impacts of water issues in the environment. The book presents international approaches to the latest developments in both the fundamental bases and the applicability of state-of-the-art knowledge that can be effectively used for solving a variety of large problems in integrated water resources management. The main focus of the book is on water pollution - physical, chemical, biological, and geographical pollution, hydrology problems, and limnology tasks.

In the world market of power-producing nuclear reactors, there is growing interest in small and medium sized or modular reactors (SMRs). These can be assembled in-factory, transported by ship or train, installed on site and connected to the electricity grid in a short time, significantly reducing the financial burden of the investment. This publication, which is the outcome of a technical meeting, presents a detailed overview of the different concepts of fast SMRs and highlights the technological, economic and safety potential of these reactors and the associated innovative systems. Although it is mainly focused on innovative reactor solutions aimed to increase safety and simplicity of design, the parameters that contribute to the final cost of the plant are also considered.

Thought leaders and experts offer the most current information and insights into energy finance

"Energy Finance" offers the most up-to-date information and compelling insights into the finance and economics of energy. With contributions from today's thought leaders who are experts in various areas of energy finance and economics, the book provides an overview of the energy industry and addresses issues concerning energy finance and economics.

The book focuses on a range of topics including corporate finance relevant to the oil and gas industry as well as addressing issues of unconventional, renewable, and alternative energy.A timely compendium of information and insights centering on topics related to energy financeWritten by Betty and Russell Simkins, two experts on the topic of the economics of energyCovers special issues related to energy finance such as hybrid cars, energy hedging, and other timely topics

In one handy resource, the editors have collected the best-thinking on energy finance.

Rising operating costs and increased competition have focused attention on the need to improve thermal performance in nuclear power plants (NPPs), to ensure efficient electricity generation. Efforts to improve thermal performance require a broad understanding of NPP design, operation, maintenance, ambient conditions, and thermal sciences. This publication provides various methodologies for tracking and trending NPP thermal performance. It describes the essential elements of a thermal performance programme, providing guidelines on the design of the balance of the plant systems for new build NPPs and improvements to an existing programme for operating NPPs.

This book calls for rethinking current climate, energy and sustainability policy-making by presenting new insights into the rebound phenomenon; i.e., the driving forces, mechanisms and extent of rebound effects and potential means of mitigating them. It pursues an innovative and novel approach to the political and scientific rebound discourse and hence, supplements the current state-of-knowledge discussed in the field of energy economics and recent reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Building on central rebound publications from the past four decades, this book is divided into three main sections: Part I highlights new aspects of rebound economics by presenting insights into issues that have so far not been satisfactorily researched, such as rebounds in countries of the Global South, rebounds on the producer-side, and rebounds from sufficiency behaviour (as opposed to rebounds from technical efficiency improvements). In turn, Part II goes beyond conventional economic rebound research, exploring multidisciplinary perspectives on the phenomenon, in particular from the fields of psychology and sociology. Advancing such multidisciplinary perspectives delivers a more comprehensive understanding of rebound's driving forces, mechanisms, and policy options. Part III puts rebounds into practice and presents several policy cases and sector-specific approaches, including the contexts of labour markets, urban planning, tourism, information and communication technologies, and transport. Lastly, the book embeds the issue into the larger debate on decoupling, green growth and degrowth, and identifies key lessons learned for sustainable development strategies and policies at large. By employing such varied and in-depth analyses, the book makes an essential contribution to the discussion of the overall question: Can resource-, energy-use and greenhouse gas emissions be substantially reduced without hindering economic growth?

Civil Liability and Financial Security for Offshore Oil and Gas Activities provides insights into the liability and compensation regime for offshore-related damage. The book analyses the legal regime in a variety of states (including the US and the UK) as well as the EU regime. In addition, the various compensation mechanisms and amounts available today to compensate offshore-related damage are described and critically analysed. Moreover, the book is based on in-depth interviews with a wide variety of relevant stakeholders including insurers, representatives from supervisory authorities, and oil and gas producers. This volume also provides a variety of policy recommendations, formulated to provide an optimal compensation regime for offshore-related damage.

This CIGRE green book begins by addressing the specification and provision of communication services in the context of operational applications for electrical power utilities, before subsequently providing guidelines on the deployment or transformation of networks to deliver these specific communication services. Lastly, it demonstrates how these networks and their services can be monitored, operated, and maintained to ensure that the requisite high level of service quality is consistently achieved.

This book provides an excellent overview of the legal issues surrounding climate change mitigation and international trade law. It surveys key observed and potential challenges posed by responses to climate change in terms of international trade law. By examining the controversial issues seen in legal cases in which domestic climate change or renewable energy measures conflicted with international trade regimes, this volume promotes and broadens the understanding and debate of the issues. Beyond the recognized challenges, this book uncovers potential areas of conflict between climate change responses and international trade promotion by exploring previous cases and current efforts to prevent climate change. Furthermore, this volume sheds light on the future direction of international trade law and climate change responses, pointing out that the development of climate change or renewable energy laws and policies must also consider international trade regimes in order to ensure the smooth implementation of said laws and policies and guarantee that international trade laws do not restrict environmental policy space.

This book presents key recent developments in biofuel policy, products, processes, patents and innovative technologies. It presents several case studies, which maximize reader insights into how innovative green energy technologies can be implemented on an industrial scale, with illustrations, photos and new approaches. It also analyzes in detail several different technological aspects of the research into and production of green fuels from the first, second and third generation, such as, bioethanol, biogas, biohydrogen, biobutanol, biofuels from pyrolysis, and discusses their economic and environmental impacts. A new source of information for engineers, technicians and students involved in production and research in the biofuels sector, this book also provides a valuable resource for industry, covering the current and future status of biofuels.

This book is about the mechanisms of wealth creation, or what we like to think of as evolutionary "progress." The massive circular flow of goods and services between producers and consumers is not a perpetual motion machine; it has been dependent for the past 150 years on energy inputs from a finite storage of fossil fuels. In this book, you will learn about the three key requirements for wealth creation, and how this process acts according to physical laws, and usually after some part of the natural wealth of the planet has been exploited in an episode of "creative destruction." Knowledge and natural capital, particularly energy, will interact to power the human wealth engine in the future as it has in the past. Will it sputter or continue along the path of evolutionary progress that we have come to expect? Can the new immaterial wealth of information and ideas, which makes up the so-called knowledge economy, replace depleted natural wealth? These questions have no simple answers, but this masterful book will help you to understand the grand challenge of our time. Praise for Energy, Complexity and Wealth Maximization: "... people who run the modern world (politicians, economists and lawyers) have a very poor grasp of how it really works because they do not understand the fundamentals of energy, exergy and entropy ... those decision-makers would greatly benefit from reading this book ..." - Vaclav Smil, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, University of Manitoba "... A grandiose design; impressive, worth reading and reflecting!" - Prof. Dr. Ernst Ulrich von Weizacker, Founder of Wuppertal Institute; Co-President of the Club of Rome, Former Member of the German Bundestag, co-chair of the UN's Resource Panel "... The book is a must read for concerned citizens and decision makers across the globe." - RK Pachauri, Founder and Executive Vice Chairman, The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) and ex-chair, International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)

This book illustrates operation and maintenance practices/guidelines for economic generation and managing health of a thermal power generator beyond its regulatory life. The book provides knowledge for professionals managing power station operations, through its unique approach to chemical analysis of water, steam, oil etc. to identify malfunctioning/defects in equipment/systems much before the physical manifestation of the problem. The book also contains a detailed procedure for conducting performance evaluation tests on different equipment, and for analyzing test results for predicting maintenance requirements, which has lent a new dimension to power systems operation and maintenance practices. A number of real life case studies also enrich the book. This book will prove particularly useful to power systems operations professionals in the developing economies, and also to researchers and students involved in studying power systems operations and control.

In this book, a number of long-term energy scenarios are developed for Nigeria considering the impact of vital factors that may influence energy policies in the country's future energy system. The energy scenarios were developed through the Long-Range Energy Alternatives Planning System (LEAP) model. The model identified the future energy demand and supply pattern using a least-cost combination of technology options while limiting the emission of greenhouse gases. The book presents four scenarios, and key parameters considered include GDP, households, population, urbanization and the growth rates of energy-intensive sectors. Further, it highlights the findings of the cost-benefit analysis, which reveal the costs of implementing selected policies and strategies in Nigeria, including those focusing on energy efficiency and fuel/technology switching. The book also discusses the application of the LEAP-OSeMOSYS Model in order to identify lowest-cost power plants for electricity generation. Some sustainable strategies that can ensure a low carbon development in Nigeria are also explored on the basis of successful country cases in relation to the Nigerian LEAP model. As such, the book will help policy makers devise energy and sustainable strategies to achieve low carbon development in Nigeria.

This book presents an analysis of why some large infrastructure projects are delayed or compromised and offers important insights into the better delivery of future projects. It provides an important reaction to the ambitious EURO315 billion investment plan devised by the European Commission, wherein Europe's infrastructure is a key investment target. Germany is adopted as a focus, as Europe's largest economy, and a nation that has seen significant delays and tensions in the delivery of key infrastructure projects. The contributions to this volume demonstrate various patterns for infrastructure assets and illustrate how factors such as poor project governance, early planning mistakes, inappropriate risk management and unforeseen technological challenges influence delivery. The in-depth case studies on the Berlin Brandenburg Airport, the Hamburg Elbphilharmonie, and offshore wind parks show how project delivery can face massive problems, and illuminating solutions are offered to these problems. Overall, the case of Germany also offers the opportunity to assess various new forms of project delivery, such as public-private partnerships (PPP), and the risks and opportunities of ambitious first-mover 'pioneer' projects. The book will be of great interest for scholars and upper-level students of human geography, business and management, as well as policy makers.

This book provides an in-depth analysis of investment problems pertaining to electric energy infrastructure, including both generation and transmission facilities. The analysis encompasses decision-making tools for expansion planning, reinforcement, and the selection and timing of investment options. In this regard, the book provides an up-to-date description of analytical tools to address challenging investment questions such as: How can we expand and/or reinforce our aging electricity transmission infrastructure? How can we expand the transmission network of a given region to integrate significant amounts of renewable generation? How can we expand generation facilities to achieve a low-carbon electricity production system? How can we expand the generation system while ensuring appropriate levels of flexibility to accommodate both demand-related and production-related uncertainties? How can we choose among alternative production facilities? What is the right time to invest in a given production or transmission facility? Written in a tutorial style and modular format, the book includes a wealth of illustrative examples to facilitate comprehension. It is intended for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in the fields of electric energy systems, operations research, management science, and economics. Practitioners in the electric energy sector will also benefit from the concepts and techniques presented here.

This book examines sustainable energy development in China, a non-liberal state, as a counterexample to conventional wisdom that effective policy outcomes are premised on the basis of decentralized governance. The use of sustainable energies as part of the solution for stabilising global warming has been promoted in industrialised countries for the past three decades. In the last ten years, China has expanded its renewable energy capacity with unprecedented speed and breadth. This phenomenon seems to contradict the principle of orthodox environmental governance, in which stakeholder participation is deemed a necessary condition for effective policy outcomes. Based upon policy documents, news report and interviews with 32 policy makers, business leaders, and NGO practitioners in selected subnational governments, this book examines the politics of sustainable energy in China. It engages debates over the relationships among democratic prioritisation, environmental protection, and economic empowerment, arguing that China's quasi-corporatist model in the sustainable energy field challenges Western scholars' dominant assumptions about ecopolitics.

This book provides an in-depth economic analysis of the challenges associated with bioenergy use and production. Drawing on New Institutional Economics and the theory of economic policy, it develops theory-based recommendations for a bioenergy policy that strives for efficiency and sustainability. Further, it shows how to deal with diverse uncertainties and constraints, such as institutional path dependencies, transaction costs, multiple and conflicting policy aims, and interacting market failures, while also applying the resulting theoretical insights to a case study analysis of Germany's bioenergy policy. As such, the book aims to bridge the gap between practical bioenergy policymaking on the one hand, and neoclassical theory-based concepts that strictly focus on a minimization of greenhouse gas mitigation costs on the other.

This book discusses the economic, political, and environmental issues surrounding the international exploration and exploitation of conventional and unconventional natural gas. Shale gas development in recent years has changed the energy discussion in the US as existing reserves of natural gas coupled with horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing make exploitation of these reserves economically feasible; the discussion is quickly becoming international in scope. The potential expansion of natural gas development impacts many regions of the globe and spans multiple perspectives. In a volatile international climate, one of intense geopolitical conflict between Russia and the West, economic slowdowns in Europe and China, military conflicts in the Middle East and northern Africa, and widening income disparity in the U.S., a relatively inexpensive and plentiful energy source like shale gas could play a key role in mitigating such conflicts. In an energy interdependent global community, however, multiple factors such as oil prices, differing rates of exploration, environmental concerns, strategic initiatives, institutional changes, legal and regulatory issues, and actions of the nations involved all have the potential to influence future outcomes. This book discusses each of these in turn, detailing the issues most prevalent in each geographical area. The first volume to provide a comprehensive global view of the impacts of shale gas development, this book fills a gap in the current research literature, providing vital information for the scholarly community and the public alike. This book will be of interest to researchers and students of economics, energy policy, public administration, and international relations as well as policy makers and residents of the regions that are experiencing shale gas development.

This monograph adresses the challenge of the environmental assessment of leightweight electric vehicles. It poses the question whether the use of lightweight materials in electric vehicles can reduce the vehicles' environmental impact and compares the environmental performance of a lightweight electric vehicle (LEV) to other types of vehicles. The topical approach focuses on methods from life cycle assessment (LCA), and the book concludes with a comprehensive concept on the environmental assessment of LEVs. The target audience primarily comprises LCA practitioners from research institutes and industry, but it may also be beneficial for graduate students specializing in the field of environmental assessment.

Several Asian cities have already invested in initiatives to build and promote Green Cities. Owing to the limited capacity of local governments, the funding of urban infrastructure has become a critical issue. Against this background, this book explores a new funding mechanism which demands the engagement of many stakeholders, including public-private partnerships. This book offers guidance on how cities in selected countries can play a key role in the green growth agenda, by stimulating growth through smart investment in urban infrastructure such as through building a physical infrastructure, offering financial and tax incentives, and heightening society's awareness of a sustainable lifestyle.

This book examines the energy dimension of the smart city from the perspective of urban planning, providing a complete overview that ranges from theoretical aspects to practical considerations and projects. In addition, it aims to illustrate how the concept of the smart city can enhance understanding of the urban system and foster new forms of management of the metropolis, including with respect to energy supply and use. Specifically, the book explores the different dimensions of the relationship between energy and the city, discusses methodological issues with a special focus on ontological approaches to sustainability, and describes practices, tools, and good examples of energy-related urban planning. The authors represent the main Italian research groups working in the field, Italy being an excellent example of a country exposed to energy problems due to, for example, vulnerability to climate change and lack of primary energy resources. This book will be valuable for students of urban planning, town planners, and researchers interested in understanding the changing nature of the city and the challenges posed by energy issues.