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Improving access to sustainable energy services and reducing the carbon footprint and deforestation of developing countries presents a substantial challenge to the development industry. This paper aims to critically assess two prevalent business models emerging to meet this challenge: financial institution–technology provider partnerships and the one-stop-shop, pay-as-you-go (PAYG) model. The authors find that collaborations between financial institutions and energy providers need to address grey areas such as product quality standards, marketing, and post-sales services, and incorporate feedback loops to continually evaluate the performance of the partnership. Pay-as-you-go presents an intriguing business case to leapfrog more traditional energy access programmes. However, more robust results from the field need to be reported before the PAYG movement can claim success. Ultimately, collaborative and integrated actions by all stakeholders are needed to achieve universal energy access.

Current energy market designs and pricing schemes fail to give investors the appropriate market signals. In particular, energy prices are not high enough to attract investors to build new or maintain existing power capacity. In this paper we propose a method to compute second-best Pareto optimal equilibrium prices for any market exhibiting non-convexities and, based on this result, an energy market design able to restore the correct energy price signals for supply investors.

Abstract. Regional land carbon budgets provide insights on the spatial distribution of the land uptake of atmospheric carbon dioxide, and can be used to evaluate carbon cycle models and to define baselines for land-based additional mitigation efforts. The scientific community has been involved in providing observation-based estimates of regional carbon budgets either by downscaling atmospheric CO2 observations into surface fluxes with atmospheric inversions, by using inventories of carbon stock changes in terrestrial ecosystems, by upscaling local field observations such as flux towers with gridded climate and remote sensing fields or by integrating data-driven or process-oriented terrestrial carbon cycle models. The first coordinated attempt to collect regional carbon budgets for nine regions covering the entire globe in the RECCAP-1 project has delivered estimates for the decade 2000–2009, but these budgets were not comparable between regions, due to different definitions and component fluxes reported or omitted. The recent recognition of lateral fluxes of carbon by human activities and rivers, that connect CO2 uptake in one area with its release in another also requires better definition and protocols to reach harmonized regional budgets that can be summed up to the globe and compared with the atmospheric CO2 growth rate and inversion results. In this study, for the international initiative RECCAP-2 coordinated by the Global Carbon Project, which aims as an update of regional carbon budgets over the last two decades based on observations, for 10 regions covering the globe, with a better harmonization that the precursor project, we provide recommendations for using atmospheric inversions results to match bottom-up carbon accounting and models, and we define the different component fluxes of the net land atmosphere carbon exchange that should be reported by each research group in charge of each region. Special attention is given to lateral fluxes, inland water fluxes and land use fluxes.

Abstract The implementation of occupancy-controlled and daylighting-dimmed lighting systems has an impact on the energy consumption of residential buildings. The BAC factor method of EN ISO 52120-1 estimates that 8% of the lighting energy can be saved compared to conventional manual control. However, it is assumed that their ability to potentially lower the lighting energy consumption is strongly related to external factors, such as the extent of daylight entrance and the behaviour of the inhabitants. By means of simulations in EnergyPlus, the performances of automated and manual lighting control are compared for an apartment and semi-detached building located in Brussels (Belgium) with variation in the occupant behaviour and orientation. It appears that an automated lighting control including 0-100% dimmer reduces the lighting energy demand for all investigated cases with savings up to 38.4%, whereas a similar control without dimmer does not necessarily reduce the lighting electricity demand. However, the results show a considerable variation, making prediction methods as the BAC factor method highly inaccurate. The actual relative energy performance depends on the automation system, type of building, orientation and occupant behaviour (i.e. number of inhabitants and occupancy rate). Hereby, the number of inhabitants has the most considerable impact on the relative energy performances with differences up to 50%, while the occupancy rate shows a significant correlation, especially for low numbers of inhabitants.

Abstract In many visions and roadmaps, there is a broad agreement that fuel cells – both for stationary and mobile applications – are the key technology to allow the development of a hydrogen infrastructure. Furthermore, this development is generally thought to be based on a gradual, decentralised evolution. Nevertheless, in this paper it is argued that, taking into account the entire hydrogen chain (production, transport, storage, distribution and end-use), this decentralised fuel-cell based philosophy shows some serious flaws. Therefore, a new hydrogen-transition approach was pushed forward: mixing in of hydrogen into the natural-gas bulk. Using Flanders – the Northern part of Belgium – as a case study, the development of a transitory hydrogen infrastructure has been studied, taking into account the entire hydrogen chain and its dynamics, from production to end use. In a next step, this transition is being quantified. An optimisation model has been developed using Matlab and the commercial solvers GAMS and CPLEX. Following a mixed-integer linear-programming approach, this model is able to determine the economically optimal hydrogen-production mix and operational behaviour of each hydrogen-production plant separately. The model then allows gaining valuable insights in the importance of storage and the influence of fuel prices and carbon taxes with regard to the development of an early hydrogen economy.

We show per record the assigned classification of the wear. We classified the condition of wear of the upperwings in 12,425 butterflies according to four categories: (1) immaculate: fresh, or with at most one tiny scratch on the upper wings or one minor dent to the wing edges, (2) slightly worn: some scratches on the upper wing and/or small dents to the edges, (3) moderately worn: many scratches to the upper wing and/or dented edges, and (4) heavily worn: (parts with) colors faded and/or heavily dented edges. The categories were chosen to allow the distinction of recently emerged individuals in particular: there is “more wear” between categories 3 and 4 than between the first two. Persistent wear and abrasions with multiple impacts at several spots was given more weight in the classification than a single major incident that resulted in larger parts of the wing missing. Pictures were randomly sorted before being classified by Jos Van Kerckhoven, who worked from a series of reference examples.

The rich information of electron energy-loss spectroscopy (EELS) comes from the complex inelastic scattering process whereby fast electrons transfer energy and momentum to atoms, exciting bound electrons from their ground states to higher unoccupied states. To quantify EELS, the common practice is to compare the cross-sections integrated within an energy window or fit the observed spectrum with theoretical differential cross-sections calculated from a generalized oscillator strength (GOS) database with experimental parameters [1]. The previous Hartree-Fock-based [2] or DFT-based [3] GOS was calculated from Schrödinger's solution of atomic orbitals, which does not include the full relativistic effects. Here, we attempt to go beyond the limitations of the Schrödinger solution in the GOS tabulation by including the full relativistic effects using the Dirac equation within the local density approximation using FAC [4], which is particularly important for core-shell electrons of heavy elements with strong spin-orbit coupling. This has been done for all elements in the periodic table (up to Z = 118) for all possible excitation edges using modern computing capabilities and parallelization algorithms. The relativistic effects of fast incoming electrons were included to calculate cross-sections that are specific to the acceleration voltage. We make these tabulated GOS available under an open-source license to the benefit of both academic users as well as allowing integration into commercial solutions. If you wish to be notfied by the database updates, please register here. For details, you can find the paper on arxiv. Database Details: Covers all elements (Z: 1-108) and all edges Large energy range: 0.01 - 4000 eV Large momentum range: from minimum momentum transfer to double Bethe ridge for each edge. Adaptive momentum sampling is developed in such a manner to maximize the physical information for a given finite number of sampling points. For example, for C edge this range is 0.14 -67 Å-1 Fine log sampling: 128 points for energy and 256 points for momentum Data format: GOSH [3] Calculation Details: Single atoms only; solid-state effects are not considered Unoccupied states before continuum states of ionization are not considered; no fine structure Plane Wave Born Approximation Frozen Core Approximation is employed; electrostatic potential remains unchanged for orthogonal states when a core-shell electron is excited Self-consistent Dirac–Fock–Slater iteration is used for Dirac calculations; A modified local density approximation is used for the correct asymptotic behavior of the exchange energy; continuum states are normalized against asymptotic form at large distances Both large and small component contributions of Dirac solutions are included in GOS Final state contributions are included until the contribution of the last states falls below 0.1%. A convergence log is provided for reference. Version 1.6.5 release note: Add a compact version of the database which uses (a) single precesion, (b) 80x80 sampling in the energy and momentum space (c) 'gzip' to compress the gos data array. This helps for user with limited bandwidth for downloading. Version 1.6.1 release note: Add missing metadata Version 1.6 release note: Improved convergence for M and N edges for some elements Version 1.5 release note: Adaptive sampling for momentum space (previously it is fixed at 0.05 -50 Å-1, now adaptive for each edge) Improved convergence Version 1.2 release note: Add “File Type / File version” information Version 1.1 release note: Update to be consistent with GOSH data format [3] All the edges are now within a single hdf5 file. A notable change in particular, the sampling in momentum is in 1/m, instead of previously in 1/Å. Great thanks to Gulio Guzzinati for his suggestions and sending conversion script for GOSH format. [1] Verbeeck, J., and S. Van Aert. Ultramicroscopy 101.2-4 (2004): 207-224. [2] Leapman, R. D., P. Rez, and D. F. Mayers. The Journal of Chemical Physics 72.2 (1980): 1232-1243. [3] Segger, L, Guzzinati, G, & Kohl, H. Zenodo (2023). doi:10.5281/zenodo.7645765 [4] Gu, M. F. Canadian Journal of Physics 86(5) (2008): 675-689. The authors acknowledge financial support from the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO, Belgium) through Project No.G.0502.18N. This project has also received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant Agreement No. 770887 PICOMETRICS and No. 823717 ESTEEM3).

This is a Phase 3 multicenter, double-blind, double-dummy, randomized study. Only subjects with PV who have received HU for at least 12 weeks, have been receiving a stable dose before screening, and still have symptoms related to PV will be enrolled. Subjects will be randomized (1:1) to 1 of 2 treatment arms: A: ruxolitinib and HU-placebo B: HU and ruxolitinib-placebo Subjects randomized to either arm may be eligible to transition to open-label ruxolitinib after Week 16. The purpose of the RELIEF study is to compare symptoms in polycythemia vera (PV) subjects treated with ruxolitinib versus subjects treated with hydroxyurea (HU) as measured by the percent of subjects who achieve a clinically meaningful symptom improvement (ie, total symptom score reduction of ≥ 50% reduction) at Week 16 compared to Baseline. The study is also designed to demonstrate that these responses are durable with continued treatment.