• Energy Research
• Closed Access close
• NL close
• GB close
• BE close
• English close

Genuine Savings (GS), also known as ‘net adjusted savings’, is a composite indicator of the sustainability of economic development. Genuine Savings reflects year-on-year changes in the total wealth or capital of a country, including net investment in produced capita, investment in human capital, depletion of natural resources, and damage caused by pollution. A negative Genuine Savings rate suggests that the stock of national wealth is declining and that future utility must be less than current utility, indicating that economic development is non-sustainable (Hamilton and Clemens, 1999). We make use of data over a 150 year period to examine the relationship between Genuine Savings and a number of indicators of well-being over time, and compare the relative changes in human, produced, and components of natural capital over the period. Overall, we find that the magnitude of genuine savings is positively related to changes in future consumption, with some evidence of a cointegrating relationship. However, the relationships between genuine savings and infant mortality or average heights are less clear.

This timely book critically examines the role played by international, regional and national legal frameworks in holding corporations operating in the natural resource sector accountable for human rights violations in the Global South, probing the effectiveness of the mechanisms available to aggrieved communities in pursuit of effective remedies and socio-ecological justice. The book brings together influential scholars from across the world addressing topical and relevant themes concerning the integration of business & human rights standards for better governance of natural resources and the transition towards net zero societies, especially in the context of extractive and multinational companies operating in the Global South. It also considers the application and implementation of transnational and domestic legal remedies for holding corporations accountable with references to case studies in natural resources governance in selected countries and regions, in particular Africa, Asia and Latin America. The book reviews proposals for an enforceable legal framework on the liability of corporations for human rights abuses and environmental damage, taking account of the existing initiatives such as the OECD Guidelines on Multinational Enterprises, the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, UN’s Draft Business & Human Rights Treaty and the European Commission’s 2022 proposal for a Directive on Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence. The book is essential reading for academics and students working or researching in the fields of business law, human rights and natural resources law; as well as corporate and human rights lawyers and practitioners litigating in the energy and natural resources sectors.

Increasing the rate of renovation for the existing building stock is a crucial challenge for EU’s energy policy. The Smart City Block (SCB) project proposes an innovative answer to this challenge. The underlying hypothesis is that introducing a collective dimension to renovation could result in increasing rates of renovation while also impacting positively the efficiency of the renovation and the social ties within urban areas. The collective dimension considered is the city block in Brussels.The first part of this paper describes the theoretical part of the project that was necessary to develop an adapted methodology. It describes the SCB offering, Brussels segmentation and some results of surveys.The SCB offering shows that many different options can be proposed to the city block dwellers, ranging from a collective insulation, efficient heating systems and shared photovoltaics to collective kitchen garden in the inner space of the block, shared vehicles or shared spaces. This is especially relevant for Brussels where city blocks often have an inner space that could be used. Besides, the segmentation of Brussels based on city block characteristics offers a typology that can be further used to target specific environmental or social deficit.However, the collective dimension introduced in the project is challenging for western individualistic minds. In order to evaluate the acceptance of households, a survey was conducted on 4 city blocks in Brussels, representing over 450 households. It shows a clear willingness to investigate the concept further but only if concrete proposals with estimations of energy and financial savings are provided. Sharing space, equipment and activities was more positively accepted than what we initially expected. Although the attitude-behaviour gap must not be underestimated, this opening can be viewed as an evolution of lifestyles in some segments of the population. Governance and institutional arrangements are expected to play a critical role in supporting this evolution.The second ...

Attempts by governments and NGOs to provide modern solutions to the management of local water resources, and to alleviate the hazards of flooding, often create unforeseen problems adversely affecting future water resources and leading to increased vulnerability to crises. The book outlines the need to develop an integrative approach. The Hydro-hazardscape concept draws upon the landscape school within cultural geography to make a case for awarding centrality to hazards in social life, that parallels the esthetic view in the landscape tradition. The approach furthermore, makes a case for apprehending power differentials inherent in social life by being attentive to the dissonance and conflict between the analytical view of hazardous environments by the powerful and technocrats and lived experience of those environments by the vulnerable populations. It is argued that by adopting the approach that is attentive to the multiple values of water in the communities affected, can one hope for any measure of success. Examples from South Asia, Central America, the Caucasus and the USA, illustrate how the approach will help achieve long-term sustainability in a future filled with climate change.

Wind turbines are a proven source of clean energy with wind power energy harvesting technologies supplying about 3% of global electricity consumption. However there is an increasing demand on maintenance and operational improvements since turbines have been plagued with downtime problems of major components e.g. gearboxes and generators, especially with offshore turbines which are difficult to access. Reliability Centric Maintenance (RCM) is a way of capturing the potential causes of downtime and poor performance by preventing failures and having a proactive approach to operations and maintenance (O&M). However, for a large fleet of turbines, adopting the RCM approach becomes difficult due to the complexities that arise as a result of the interactions between individual elements that make up the system in the product lifecycle. This paper discusses how a systems thinking approach can be used to identify the relevant aspects and possible interactions between the RCM approach and wind turbine gearboxes and also how the gaps that exist within the system can be closed so as to add value to business. The outcome of the paper is a proposal for applying a systems approach to wind turbine gearbox operation and maintenance, optimising the asset value adding contribution at minimal total cost to the operator.

The energy yield of PV systems with horizontal single-axis tracking and bifacial panels was calculated using BIGEYE. BIGEYE is a versatile code developed at ECN part of TNO to calculate the yield of bifacial PV. Comparison to recent measured data with the BIFOROT set-up at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences showed very good agreement. Our BIGEYE results show that the bifacial energy gain and the tracking gain are mostly additive, making the combination of bifacial panels and tracking a very attractive option. For two different locations, Doha and Amsterdam, increases of energy yield in the order of 25% compared to monofacial, fixed tilt systems are possible at relatively modest ground cover values. 35th European Photovoltaic Solar Energy Conference and Exhibition; 1573-1577

In this thesis, I analyze the impacts of the design and implementation of different environmental policy tools from a theoretical and empirical perspective: certificates providing information on the energy performance of buildings (chapter 1); urban road pricing schemes such as congestion charges (chapter 2); quantity-based policy tools to support production with non-polluting technologies (chapter 3).In chapter 1, co-authored with Luisa Dressler, we study how energy performance certificates (EPCs) impact the residential rental market. These certificates can help solve information asymmetries between landlords and tenants about the thermal quality of dwellings for rent, which, in turn, is expected to facilitate investment aimed at improving dwellings' energy performance. However, disclosure of EPCs is often incomplete, which hampers their effectiveness in relieving such information asymmetries. Moreover, even when a certificate is available, landlords do not always disclose it. This contradicts the so-called information unraveling result, according to which all landlords should disclose quality information unless it is costly to do so: in such a setting, information eventually unravels. Using a cross-sectional dataset of residential rental advertisements from the Belgian region of Brussels, we empirically evaluate incentives to disclose energy performance ratings. We find that two fundamental assumptions underlying the unraveling result are not confirmed in our setting: firstly, tenants value energy performance of rental property only when dwellings are of very high quality; secondly, tenants do not appear to rationally adjust their expectations when faced with dwellings that withhold their energy performance rating. Finally, we formulate specific policy advice for reforming EPC mechanisms to increase disclosure rates.In chapter 2, I study how urban congestion pricing impacts the use of sustainable mobility options such as bike sharing, presenting evidence from the city of Milan, Italy.As concern for air ...

This article will address a number of issues of law and policy. First, each option requires to be analysed in terms of the wider debate on relative sustainability in waste management, in order to determine which is most effective and attainable. Secondly, the solid waste route presents a number of particular problems. The term 'domestic sanitary solids' is not a term of art and its meaning must be compared to relevant statutory definitions. Consequential issues arise in relation to the lawfulness of current methods of disposal, particularly whether special provision is required under rules for the management of clinical waste. Finally, an assessment is made of the effects of new EU legislation, in particular the Landfill Directive, and conclusions are drawn as to the Best Practicable Environmental Options for policymakers and other stakeholders in waste and wastewater management. It should be noted that whilst most waste management legislation is uniform throughout Great Britain, legislation relating to the supply of sewerage services is not. Unless otherwise stated, the applicable law is that of Scotland. However, the analysis will be applicable wherever the WC is used as a disposal route for domestic waste.