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The recent dispositions related to the energy performance of buildings, launched by the European Directives 2002/91/EC and 2010/31/EU, turned attention to the Energy Performance Certificate (EPC). The aim of this study is to investigate the economic effects of the recent Italian statutory provisions related to energy performance of buildings on listing behaviour. With this aim an hedonic regression analysis is performed, in order to measure the impact of EPC level on listing prices. The study, based on a set of more than 500 housing property asset collected in 2012 from real estate advertisements websites, is focused on the Turin real estate market as a case study. Furthermore this paper contributes to the early limited literature on implication of the impact of EPC level on Italian housing market, representing one of the first systematic evidence about the energy certifications in the housing listing prices. Aestimum, Aestimum 65 (2014)

Recent extreme weather events have resulted in an ongoing discussion on the issues of land use and compensation payments within Austrian agriculture. Building on a functional evaluation system for agricultural lands as developed within the Interreg IIIB project “ILUP”, the national project “Agriculture and Flooding” has as its goal to classify the flood-protection contribution and flood sensitivity of agricultural lands. This, in turn, enables the recommendation of targeted measures for potentially improving flood situations, as well as an estimate of their implementation costs. In addition to the digital soil map, other fundamental sources used for the project are the digital flood risk map, IACS land-use data and works by the Institute for Land and Water Management Research. Reference values and marginal returns sourced from the Federal Institute of Agricultural Economics also flow into the cost estimates for the recommended combination. The results will contribute to an understanding of the multifunctionality of agricultural lands and to the setting of priorities on a regional scale regarding packaged flood-prevention and damage-minimization. However, the results at hand can only serve as one step toward regional flood protection projects, whose development will require the cooperation of all interest groups.

The devolatilization of solid fuels is of crucial importance for all thermo­chemical processes and is the basic step in gasification and combustion models. Here a structural model is developed to provide an Advanced tool for Biomass and Coal Devolatilization (ABCD model), even in blend. The main features are founded on the original approach of the CPD (Chemical Percolation Devolatilization) model by Fletcher [1]. The ABCD model extends the approach also to biomass fuels. Further improvements of the ABCD model are: (i) a population balance between n­mers in liquid metaplast; (ii) elemental balance closure with the speciation of light gases, hetero­species and tar composition; (iii) introduction of secondary reactions of tar­cracking and crosslinking. The ABCD model results agree with a selection of experimental data (from homemade and literature works) on different biomasses. The results reported in this paper encouraged IFRF in continuing the experimental campaign for the validation of the model by extending the Solid Fuel DataBase SFDB. The inclusion of ABCD in comprehensive codes (e.g., Reactor Network Analysis, RNA [2]) and process models is valuable because it gives detailed distribution of pyrolysis products in a wide range of conditions with a low computational cost. Proceedings of the 18th European Biomass Conference and Exhibition, 3-7 May 2010, Lyon, France, pp. 923-930

In electricity distribution systems with weakly meshed structure and radial operation, the determination of the optimal radial configuration for a given objective function (e.g., minimum losses) is a challenging task because of lack of regularity of the system topology. This paper provides benchmark results on the determination of the configuration with minimum losses for five test networks commonly used in the literature. The analysis is carried out for a single set of data representing the system loading. Further results considering a multiple reconfigurations run at successive time intervals are included in the companion paper (Part 2).

This paper applies the approach indicated in the companion paper (Part 1) to study the persistence of the optimal configurations in distribution systems with time- dependent generation and load patterns. The solution ranking is carried out at each time step, then a comparison among the solutions is made in the perspective of dividing the time period during the day to apply intra-day reconfiguration separately for the daylight and the night periods. The related savings in the energy losses with respect to maintaining the same globally optimal configuration during the day are illustrated and discussed on a test network example. Three performance indices are defined to obtain and compare the corresponding ranking of the configurations during the time period considered.