Silver Buckshot or Bullet: Is a Future “Energy Mix” Necessary?

A nuclear real-world experiment: Exploring the experimental mindsets of radioactive waste management organisations in France, Belgium and Canada

Following the theoretical approach of Herbold (1995), Gross and Krohn (2005), and Van de Poel et al. (2017), this article argues that nuclear waste management is a real-world experiment. Based on this first assumption, we examine how radioactive waste management (RWM) organizations conceive or organize their experiments. Through three illustrative case studies in France, Belgium and Canada, we highlight how the RWM organizations obliged to participate in complex networks and unable to completely control the experimental process, adopt two different attitudes: an "open" or "closed" experimental mindset. We argue that these mindsets provide different answers to the questions: which main variables to focus on, how and who should design them, how to deal with conflicts and unexpected events, what are the justifications for participation and expert analysis, and what are the expected outputs and outcomes. The findings underline that although some RWM organizations have -at least since the participatory turn- had some 'open' mindset moments in some cases, they quickly revert to a closed mindset. We conclude by emphasizing the need for practitioners and scholars to further examine and evaluate the virtues of the open mindset when the experimenter assumes the program has a real-world experimental status. This status recognizes the limits of control over experimental conditions, allows for more substantial moral considerations when making technical choices before wider audiences and allows for collective sharing of responsibility, knowledge production and trade-offs over such a long-term and controversial program.

Energy and Climate Policy—An Evaluation of Global Climate Change Expenditure 2011–2018

Concern for climate change is one of the drivers of new, transitional energy policies oriented towards economic growth and energy security, along with reduced greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and preservation of biodiversity. Since 2010, the Climate Policy Initiative (CPI) has been publishing annual Global Landscape of Climate Finance reports. According to these reports, US$3660 billion has been spent on global climate change projects over the period 2011–2018. Fifty-five percent of this expenditure has gone to wind and solar energy. According to world energy reports, the contribution of wind and solar to world energy consumption has increased from 0.5% to 3% over this period. Meanwhile, coal, oil, and gas continue to supply 85% of the world’s energy consumption, with hydroelectricity and nuclear providing most of the remainder. With this in mind, we consider the potential engineering challenges and environmental and socioeconomic impacts of the main energy sources (old and new). We find that the literature raises many concerns about the engineering feasibility as well as environmental impacts of wind and solar. However, none of the current or proposed energy sources is a “panacea”. Rather, each technology has pros and cons, and policy-makers should be aware of the cons as well as the pros when making energy policy decisions. We urge policy-makers to identify which priorities are most important to them, and which priorities they are prepared to compromise on.

Internet of Energy (IoE) and High-Renewables Electricity System Market Design

The growing importance of the Internet of Energy (IoE) brands the high-renewables electricity system a realistic scenario for the future electricity system market design. In general, the whole gist behind the IoE is developed upon a somewhat broader idea encompassing the so-called “Internet of Things” (IoT), which envisioned a plethora of household appliances, utensils, clothing, smart trackers, smart meters, and vehicles furnished with tiny devices. These devices would record all possible data from all those objects in real time and allow for a two-way exchange of information that makes it possible to optimize their use. IoT employs the Internet Protocol (IP) and the worldwide web (WWW) network for transferring information and data through various types of networks and gateways as well as sensor technologies. This paper presents an outline stemming from the implications of the high-renewables electric system that would employ the Internet of Energy (IoE). In doing so, it focuses on the implications that IoE brings into the high-renewables electricity market inhabited by smart homes, smart meters, electric vehicles, solar panels, and wind turbines, such as the peer-to-peer (P2P) energy exchange between prosumers, optimization of location of charging stations for electric vehicles (EVs), or the information and energy exchange in the smart grids. We show that such issues as compatibility, connection speed, and most notoriously, trust in IoE applications among households and consumers would play a decisive role in the transition to the high-renewables electricity systems of the 21st century. Our findings demonstrate that the decentralized approach to energy system effective control and operation that is offered by IoE is highly likely to become ubiquitous as early as 2030. Since it may be optimal that large-scale rollouts start in the early 2020s, some form of government incentives and funding (e.g. subsidies for installing wind turbines or solar panels or special feed-in-tariffs for buying renewable energy) may be needed for the energy market to make early progress in embracing more renewables and in reducing the costs of later investments. In addition, there might be some other alternative approaches aimed at facilitating this development. We show that the objective is to minimize the overall system cost, which consists of the system investment cost and the system operating cost, subject to CO2 emissions constraints and the operating constraints of generation units, network assets, and novel carbon-free technologies, which is quite cumbersome given the trend in consumption and the planned obsolescence. This can be done through increasing energy efficiency, developing demand side management strategies, and improving matching between supply and demand side, just to name a few possibilities.