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 resource is the first-ever compilation of industry-authored case studies on how power companies are making strides toward achieving sustainable electricity in North America. The book features recent game changing efforts, candid insider stories about challenges and process, and forecasts for the next decade of innovation. Each chapter shares topic-focused case studies regarding the reality of implementing operational changes and strategies that will lead to sustainable electricity. Key technical staff and managers from top companies candidly report on failures, insights, trade-offs, internal process, resulting improvements to operational efficiencies, and natural resource and stakeholder benefits. Electric power company managers seeking to identify specific opportunities and understand the process for advancing sustainability in their own organizations will discover solid paths forward through potentially treacherous terrain. Educated stakeholders, agencies, and regulators will benefit from the greater understanding of the reality of realizing change in the electric power industry engendered by this unique strategic resource.

While oil price fluctuations in the past can be explained by pure supply factors, this book argues that it is monetary policy that plays a significant role in setting global oil prices. It is a key factor often neglected in much of the earlier literature on the determinants of asset prices, including oil prices. However, this book presents a framework for modeling oil prices while incorporating monetary policy. It also provides a complete theoretical basis of the determinants of crude oil prices and the transmission channels of oil shocks to the economy. Moreover, using several up-to-date surveys and examples from the real world, this book gives insight into the empirical side of energy economics. The empirical studies offer explanations for the impact of monetary policy on crude oil prices in different periods including during the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008-2009, the impact of oil price variations on developed and emerging economies, the effectiveness of monetary policy in the Japanese economy incorporating energy prices, and the macroeconomic impacts of oil price movements in trade-linked cases. This must-know information on energy economics is presented in a reader-friendly format without being overloaded with excessive and complicated calculations. enUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Subtle Emphasis"/>

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.

This volume offers a comprehensive and empirically rich analysis of regional maritime disputes in the South China Sea (SCS). By discussing important aspects of the rise of China's maritime power, such as territorial disputes, altered perceptions of geo-politics and challenges to the US-led regional order, the authors demonstrate that a regional power shift is taking place in Asia-Pacific. The volume also provides in-depth discussions of the responses to Chinese actions by SCS claimants as well as by important non-claimant actors.

This book examines the physical and economic characteristics of the global oil resource to explain why peak oil has been so poorly understood. The author draws on information held in oil industry datasets that are not widely available outside of the specialist literature, and describes a number of methods that have been successfully used to predict oil peaks. In contrast to the widely-held view that 'all oil forecasts are wrong', these methods correctly predicted the current peak in global conventional oil production. Current oil forecasts are then compared to evaluate the expected dates for regional and global oil peaks for conventional oil, all-oils, and all-liquids. The dates of global peaks in the production of all-oil and all-liquids appear to be reasonably soon, while the oil price that is needed to support these global production levels continues to rise. The world faces serious constraints in its oil supply, which accounts for about one-third of total world energy use, and over 90% of the fuel used for transportation. Readers of this book will gain a thorough understanding of the critical, but poorly understood, phenomenon of peak oil that has already had significant impacts on society in terms of high oil prices, and which will place increasing constraints on mankind's supply of energy and economic well-being in the coming years.

This book provides an up-to-date, rigorous analysis of the state of the art of solar photovoltaic (PV) generation. It focuses on the economic analysis of solar PV generation technologies as well as the policies that have been devised and implemented around the globe to support it. It provides the main theoretical tools for understanding the cost of these technologies, and discusses them from both a historical and comparative perspective with respect to other competing technologies (both conventional and renewable). In addition, it presents the conceptual rationale to maximize reader insights into whether and how public support for these technologies is justified as well as the consequences for the economy of different promotion measures. Integrating concepts from different economics disciplines (environmental economics, innovation economics, industrial economics and public economics) into a coherent basis for the analysis of the costs and policies for solar PV electricity, it provides an update to the literature to reflect recent advances in and deployments of solar electricity and the drastic reduction in associated costs.

This book introduces the issues and problems that arise when implementing smart energy management for sustainable manufacturing in the automotive manufacturing industry and the analytical tools and applications to deal with them. It uses a number of illustrative examples to explain energy management in automotive manufacturing, which involves most types of manufacturing technology and various levels of energy consumption. It demonstrates how analytical tools can help improve energy management processes, including forecasting, consumption, and performance analysis, emerging new technology identification as well as investment decisions for establishing smart energy consumption practices. It also details practical energy management systems, making it a valuable resource for professionals involved in real energy management processes, and allowing readers to implement the procedures and applications presented.

This book presents a cross-disciplinary approach to smart grids, offering an invaluable basis for understanding their complexity and potential, and for discussing their technical, legal, economic, societal, psychological and security aspects. Smart grids are a complex phenomenon involving new, active roles for consumers and prosumers, novel social, political and cultural practices, advanced ICT, new markets, security of supply issues, the informational turn in energy, valuation of assets and investments, technological innovation and (de)regulation. Furthermore, smart grids offer new interfaces, in turn creating hybrid fields: with the increasing use of electric vehicles and electric transportation, smart grids represent the crossroads of energy and mobility. While the aim is to achieve more sustainable production, transportation and use of energy, the importance of smart grids actually has less to do with electricity, heat or gas, and far more with transforming the infrastructure needed to deliver energy, as well as the roles of its owners, operators and users. The immediate goal is to contribute positively to a sustainable world society. The chapters are revised and expanded texts based upon lectures delivered at the Groningen Energy Summer School 2014. Questions for further discussion at the end of each chapter highlight the key themes that emerge. The book offers an indispensable resource for researchers, professionals and companies in the power supply industry, and for students seeking to broaden and deepen their understanding of smart grids.

This book explores sustainability within manufacturing enterprises and examines the concepts and principles of this field. It also reviews the quantitative and qualitative tools available for analytic assessment. It presents a new framework for sustainable manufacturing requirements and discusses the implementation of sustainable manufacturing in terms of practices, indicators, and sustainability level assessments. The book also details the important conditions necessary for the conversion of existing traditional plants to ones with more sustainable processes. Chapters explore topics including the assessment of economic sustainability, social sustainability, environmental sustainability, sustainable manufacturing practices, and sustainability optimization. Serving as a reference for engineers, managers, and practitioners involved in manufacturing, this book will also be a valuable resource to students and researchers of industrial engineering, manufacturing engineering, systems engineering, and operations management.

This book adds a new dimension to the sustainability assessment of food waste reduction and valorisation: policy analysis. Featuring a transdisciplinary analysis by key experts in the field, it identifies the drivers of change in food-waste reduction and valorisation technologies by looking, for example, at the regulatory framework and at policy actions undertaken by local and global actors. The book explores the development of regulations and policies for food-waste prevention, management, and valorisation at a global as well as European Union level. It also discusses the notion of food waste in legal terms and investigates the effects of the lack of a standard, universal definition of food waste on the efficient use of by-products, promising processes and products for technological and commercial exploitation. Utilising mathematical mapping methods to assess food consumption impacts and providing supply chain models that allow the testing of consumption scenarios, the book goes on to discuss a series of emerging technologies (tested at lab scale and/ or pilot scale) and opportunities for the valorisation of food waste.

This book investigates energy management approaches for energy efficient or energy-centric system design and architecture and presents end-to-end energy management in the recent heterogeneous-type wireless network medium. It also considers energy management in wireless sensor and mesh networks by exploiting energy efficient transmission techniques and protocols. and explores energy management in emerging applications, services and engineering to be facilitated with 5G networks such as WBANs, VANETS and Cognitive networks. A special focus of the book is on the examination of the energy management practices in emerging wireless cellular and ad hoc networks. Considering the broad scope of energy management in wireless cellular and ad hoc networks, this book is organized into six sections covering range of Energy efficient systems and architectures; Energy efficient transmission and techniques; Energy efficient applications and services.

This volume of Eurasian Studies in Business and Economics focuses on latest results from research in Banking and Finance, Accounting and Corporate Governance, Growth and Development, along with a focus on the Energy sector. The first part on Accounting and Corporate Governance features articles on environmental accounting, audit quality, financial information, and adoption of governance principles. The Banking and Finance part looks at risk-behavior in banks, credit ratings during subprime crisis, stakeholder management, and stock market crises. The book focuses then on the energy sector and analyzes macroeconomic impacts of electricity generation, risk dimensions in wind energy, the latest EU energy reforms, and discusses prediction models.

This book provides international perspective for those studying or working in the security domain, from enforcement to policy. It focuses on non-traditional threats in a landscape that has been described as transnational in nature and incorporates natural disasters, gang violence, extremism and terrorism, amongst other issues. Chapters provide innovative thinking on themes including cyber security, maritime security, transnational crime, human security, globalization and economic security. Relevant theoretical frameworks are presented and readers are expertly guided through complex threats, from matters pertaining to health security which pose threats not only to humans but also have significant national security implications, to issues regarding critical infrastructure vulnerability and the complexity of understanding terrorist operations. Authors reveal how emerging uncertainties regarding global critical infrastructure and supply chain security, food security, and health security are linked to the notion of human security. Security professionals, policy makers and academics will all gain from the insights, strategies and perspectives in this book. It builds understanding of the deepening and broadening domain of security studies and provides a valuable reference text for courses on security studies and international relations.

Economic diversification remains at the top of the agenda for hundreds of regions around the world. From the single commodity economies of African countries and the Caribbean, to the many single industry regions of Europe and North America, as well as the oil and gas rich but volatile hydrocarbon economies. Economic diversification policies have been around for almost a century with varying degrees of success and failure. Economic Diversification Policies in Natural Resource Rich Economies takes a special interest in the policy experiences of a set of different countries that have extractive industries representing significant drivers of their economies and subsequently are significant contributors to government revenues. It explores twelve cases including upper-middle to high income economies such as Canada, Australia, Iceland and Norway, emerging economies such as Latin America, the GCC (Saudi and UAE), Kazakhstan, Malaysia and Russia, as well as the developing economy of Uganda. Each chapter provides a review of economic diversification experiences including policy environment, diversification strategies, desired outcomes, the role of government, and a critical evaluation of achievements. This book is suitable for those who study environmental economics, development economics and resource management.

Power system restructuring and deregulation is underway on a worldwide scale. The introduction of independent power generators, distributors and brokers has brought new challenges to the task of maintaining a reliable electricity system. Providing practical guidance to the changes ahead, this book details the competitive, regulatory and technological advances redesigning the management of power utility companies.

Features include:

• State-of-the-art techniques in power industry restructuring including guidance on asset management, transmission balancing and meter management systems.
• International case studies addressing industry-wide problems and presenting practical solutions.
• Tools for the modelling and analysis of competitive power markets.
• Coverage of the environmental impact of industry restructuring.
• Discussion of the costs and benefits associated with deregulation and restructuring.
• Survey of the new strategies and technologies available for electricity generation, transmission and distribution.

Power to the People examines the varied but interconnected relationships between energy consumption and economic development in Europe over the last five centuries. It describes how the traditional energy economy of medieval and early modern Europe was marked by stable or falling per capita energy consumption, and how the First Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century--fueled by coal and steam engines--redrew the economic, social, and geopolitical map of Europe and the world. The Second Industrial Revolution continued this energy expansion and social transformation through the use of oil and electricity, but after 1970 Europe entered a new stage in which energy consumption has stabilized. This book challenges the view that the outsourcing of heavy industry overseas is the cause, arguing that a Third Industrial Revolution driven by new information and communication technologies has played a major stabilizing role. Power to the People offers new perspectives on the challenges posed today by climate change and peak oil, demonstrating that although the path of modern economic development has vastly increased our energy use, it has not been a story of ever-rising and continuous consumption. The book sheds light on the often lengthy and complex changes needed for new energy systems to emerge, the role of energy resources in economic growth, and the importance of energy efficiency in promoting growth and reducing future energy demand.

In Mathematical Finance, the authors consider a mathematical model for the pricing of emissions permits. The model has particular applicability to the European Union Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) but could also be used to consider the modeling of other cap-and-trade schemes. As a response to the risk of Climate Change, carbon markets are currently being implemented in regions worldwide and already represent more than $30 billion. However, scientific, and particularly mathematical, studies of these carbon markets are needed in order to expose their advantages and shortcomings, as well as allow their most efficient implementation. This Brief reviews mathematical properties such as the existence and uniqueness of solutions for the pricing problem, stability of solutions and their behavior. These fit into the theory of fully coupled forward-backward stochastic differential equations (FBSDEs) with irregular coefficients. The authors present a numerical algorithm to compute the solution to these non-standard FBSDEs. They also carry out a case study of the UK energy market. This involves estimating the parameters to be used in the model using historical data and then solving a pricing problem using the aforementioned numerical algorithm. The Brief is of interest to researchers in stochastic processes and their applications, and environmental and energy economics. Most sections are also accessible to practitioners in the energy sector and climate change policy-makers.

What went wrong with American business at the end of the 20th century? Until the spring of 2001, Enron epitomized the triumph of the New Economy. Feared by rivals, worshipped by investors, Enron seemingly could do no wrong. Its profits rose every year; its stock price surged ever upward; its leaders were hailed as visionaries. Then a young Fortune writer, Bethany McLean, wrote an article posing a simple question - how, exactly, does Enron make its money? Within a year Enron was facing humiliation and bankruptcy, the largest in US history, which caused Americans to lose faith in a system that rewarded top insiders with millions of dollars, while small investors lost everything. It was revealed that Enron was a company whose business was an illusion, an illusion that Wall Street was willing to accept even though they knew what the real truth was. This book - fully updated for the paperback - tells the extraordinary story of Enron's fall.

This work executes a unique transdisciplinary methodology building on the author's previous book, A User's Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save it (Pluto, 2010), which was the first peer-reviewed study to establish a social science framework for the integrated analysis of crises across climate, energy, food, economic, terror and the police state. Since the 2008 financial crash, the world has witnessed an unprecedented outbreak of social unrest in every major continent. Beginning with the birth of the Occupy movement and the Arab Spring, the eruption of civil disorder continues to wreak havoc unpredictably from Greece to Ukraine, from China to Thailand, from Brazil to Turkey, and beyond. Yet while policymakers and media observers have raced to keep up with events, they have largely missed the biophysical triggers of this new age of unrest - the end of the age of cheap fossil fuels, and its multiplying consequences for the Earth's climate, industrial food production, and economic growth. This book for the first time develops an empirically-ground theoretical model of the complex interaction between biophysical processes and geopolitical crises, demonstrated through the analysis of a wide range of detailed case studies of historic, concurrent and probable state failures in the Middle East, Northwest Africa, South and Southeast Asia, Europe and North America. Geopolitical crises across these regions, Ahmed argues, are being driven by the proliferation of climate, food and economic crises which have at their root the common denominator of a fundamental and permanent disruption in the energy basis of industrial civilization. This inevitable energy transition, which will be completed well before the close of this century, entails a paradigm shift in the organization of civilization. Yet for this shift to result in a viable new way of life will require a fundamental epistemological shift recognizing humanity's embeddedness in the natural world. For this to be achieved, the stranglehold of conventional models achieved through the hegemony of establishment media reporting - dominated by fossil fuel interests - must be broken. While geopolitics cannot be simplistically reduced to the biophysical, this book shows that international relations today can only be understood by recognizing the extent to which the political is embedded in the biophysical. Although the book offers a rigorous scientific analysis, it is written in a clean, journalistic style to ensure readability and accessibility to a general audience. It will contain a large number of graphical illustrations concerning oil production data, population issues, the food price index, economic growth and debt, and other related issues to demonstrate the interconnections and correlations across key sectors.

Die Autoren erlautern wichtige Grundlagen fur das Verstandnis der relevanten energetischen Zusammenhange und beschreiben die wichtigsten Energietreiber. Mit Hilfe der von ihnen vorgestellten Methodik konnen bei der Planung von Fabriken fruhzeitig adaquate energieeffiziente Losungen gefunden werden. Sie stellen Instrumente zur Analyse und Bewertung des Energieverbrauchs fur die Ausgangssituation und zur Uberwachung und Beeinflussung im dauerhaften Betrieb vor. Mit Praxisbeispielen, insbesondere aus der Automobilindustrie."

In the post-9/11 world, the possibility of energy infrastructure-terrorism-the use of weapons to cause devastating damage to the energy industrial sector and cause cascading effects-is very real. Energy Infrastructure Protection and Homeland Security, Second Edition, is a reference for those involved with our energy infrastructure who want quick answers to complicated questions. It is intended to help employers and employees handle security threats they must be prepared to meet on a daily basis. This updated second edition focuses on all components of the energy sector, including sites involved in producing, refining, transporting, generating, transmitting, conserving, building, distributing, maintaining, and controlling energy systems and system components. It presents common-sense methodologies in a straightforward manner and is accessible to those who have no experience with energy infrastructure or homeland security. Through this text, readers gain an understanding of the challenges of domestic preparedness and the immediate need for heightened awareness regarding the present threats faced by the energy sector as a potential terrorist target. This book provides knowledge of security principles and measures that can be implemented, adding a critical component not only to one's professional knowledge but also giving one the tools needed to combat terrorism.

First published in 1940, this book describes how the power industry originated and describes the various types of machinery and equipment used in power stations up to the end of the nineteenth century, by which point the steam turbine and three-phase turbo alternator became more commonly employed. The text is also accompanied by engravings and photographs of Victorian power stations and equipment. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in the history of public electricity supply.

Water is a basic human need and a scarce commodity with increasing value to farmers, industries, and cities in an urbanizing world. It is unpredictable in supply and quality, difficult to contain or direct, and notoriously difficult to manage well. Several trends - climate change, the endurance of widespread global water poverty, intensifying competition among rival uses and users, and the vulnerability of critical freshwater ecosystems - combine to intensify the challenges of governing water wisely, fairly, and efficiently. The twenty-seven chapters in The Oxford Handbook of Water Politics and Policy address such issues over the course of seven thematic sections. These themes reflect familiar frameworks in the water policy world, including water, poverty, and health; water and nature; and water equity and justice. Other sections look at emergent and contentious policy arenas, including the water/energy/food nexus and management of uncertainty in water supply, or connect well-established strands in new ways, including sections on water tools (water price and value, supply and demand, privatization, corporate responsibility) and issues surrounding transboundary waters. This volume conceives of water as a global issue, and gathers a diverse group of leading scholars of water politics and policy.

Ausgehend von den naturwissenschaftlichen und technischen Grundlagen werden in dem Band Technologien zur Abscheidung, Speicherung und Nutzung von klimaschadlichem CO2 vorgestellt. Der Stand der Technik wird dargelegt, die Energiebilanzen verschiedener Techniken verglichen, rechtliche, wirtschaftliche und gesellschaftspolitische Aspekte beschrieben und daruber hinaus die Standpunkte der verschiedenen Interessengruppen vorgestellt. Um sachlich informieren zu konnen, legen die Autoren die Kriterien fur die Bewertung der einzelnen Sichtweisen offen."