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Power-to-gas (PtG) facilities apply the chemical process of water electrolysis to produce hydrogen and represent a low-carbon alternative to conventional hydrogen production methods when coupled with renewable energy sources. This thesis aims to evaluate the economic potential of the PtG technology and explore how policy changes can affect its profitability, measured by the break-even price of hydrogen. For the derivation of the break-even price, I rely on a net present value model that considers cost and revenue components as levelized terms, which I adapt by incorporating energy policy instruments. I develop an algorithm for the investment analysis of PtG projects, which considers both the capacity of the PtG facility and the renewable energy source as variables and optimizes their ratio for profitability. My analysis shows that large-scale PtG facilities can already compete on the market for medium-scale hydrogen supply at a price of 3.55 €/kg. However, profitable operations of small-scale PtG plants still depend on the implementation of policy changes. I find that small systems could produce pure renewable hydrogen at a break-even price below 3.00 €/kg and thus more than halve their costs, if supportive policy measures were adopted. Keywords: Hydrogen economics; power-to-gas; renewable energy; capacity optimization. Junior Management Science, Bd. 5 Nr. 4 (2020)

The aim of this research was to assess how we can ensure that global learning is sustainable in schools in England. It was undertaken with teachers involved in the Global Learning Programme (GLP) to provide an insight into their views about the positive aspects in schools that ensure that this is possible. It also looks at what these teachers perceive to be some of the problems that make it difficult for schools to succeed in successfully implementing and sustaining global learning, and gives some advice to schools who want to engage with global learning.

Effective decision making to allocate public funds for energy technology research, development, and demonstration (R&D) requires considering alternative investment opportunities that can have large but highly uncertain returns and a multitude of positive or negative interactions. This paper proposes and implements a method to support R&D decisions that propagates uncertainty through an economic model to estimate the benefits of an R&D portfolio, accounting for innovation spillovers and technology substitution and complementarity. The proposed method improves on the existing literature by: (a) using estimates of the impact of R&D investments from one of the most comprehensive sets of expert elicitations on this topic to date; (b) using a detailed energy-economic model to estimate evaluation metrics relevant to an energy R&D portfolio: e.g., system benefits, technology diffusion, and uncertainty around outcomes; and (c) using a novel sampling and optimization strategy to calculate optimal R&D portfolios. This design is used to estimate an optimal energy R&D portfolio that maximizes the net economic benefits under an R&D budget constraint. Results parameterized based on expert elicitations conducted in 2009-2011 in the United States provide indicative results that show: (1) an expert-recommended portfolio in 2030, relative to the BAU portfolio, can reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 46 million tonnes, increase economic surplus by $29 billion, and increase renewable energy generation by 39 TWh; (2) uncertainty around the estimates of R&D benefits is large and overall uncertainty increases with greater investment levels; (3) a 10-fold expansion from 2012 levels in the annual R&D budget for utility-scale energy storage, bioenergy, advanced vehicles, fossil energy, nuclear energy, and solar photovoltaic technologies can be justified by returns to economic surplus; (4) the greatest returns to public R&D investment are in energy storage and solar photovoltaics; and (5) the current allocation of energy R&D funds is very different from optimal portfolios. Taken together, these results demonstrate the utility of applying new methods to improve the cost-effectiveness and environmental performance in a deliberative approach to energy R&D portfolio decision making.

This Deliverable 3.4 aims to elicit stakeholders’ experience and perspectives concerning renewable energy communities (RECs), to identify solutions to improve legal and policy frameworks and provide enabling conditions for RECs development, and opportunities and limitations for cross-country knowledge transfer. Building on the in-depth and qualitative study on how relevant actors perceive drivers and barriers to establish and successfully run RECs in Deliverable 2.3 - Synthesis Report on case-studies of drivers and barriers in five selected target regions (Standal et al. 2022), this Deliverable explores national and target region stakeholders’ views on attitudes, motivations, relevant technologies and legal forms, promising sectors for RECs, main barriers for developing RECs. Furthermore, the stakeholders’ familiarity with REDII and REC as a concept is explored, as well as national and local policies and support mechanisms that are seen as relevant for cross-country/region transfer.

A thesis submitted to the University of Bedfordshire, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of doctor of Philosophy. ; Achieving sustainability in the supply chain is not a choice but an inevitable necessity for the organisation to survive and thrive in the long run. Supplier collaboration to achieve sustainability is widely recognised but poorly studied phenomena. While there is a handful of studies that focused on collaboration for sustainability in food supply chains, only a few considered sustainable (i.e. environmental, cost and social) or Triple Bottom Line (TBL) performance, and in the context of UK food industry, there is hardly any study. Building on previous studies, this thesis addressed these concerns conceptually and empirically by: a) examining supplier collaboration for sustainable performance; b) assessing supplier collaboration for environment friendly and socially responsible practices; c) measuring environment friendly and socially responsible practices for sustainable performance; and d) validating environment friendly and socially responsible practices as the mediators for supplier collaboration and sustainable performance. To achieve these objectives, first, a structured literature review was performed and identified 61 studies that documented supplier collaboration for sustainability, and a comprehensive review was also conducted to expand the research domain. Second, underpinned by Relational View (RV) theory, a set of 17 testable hypotheses (including sub-hypotheses) were developed, and a survey method was used to collect 203 useable data from UK based food businesses who maintain collaborative relationships with their suppliers. Finally, for data analysis, Partial Least Squared- Structural Equations Modelling (PLS-SEM) technique was used with SmartPLS3 software. The empirical findings validated that: a) supplier collaboration improves environmental, cost and social performance; b) supplier collaboration contributes to improved environment friendly and socially ...