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To study the economic and environmental effects of human capital, previous studies measure human capital based on education; however, this approach has many shortcomings because not all educated people are innovative human capital. Hence, this study introduces the concept of innovative human capital by developing a new index that measures human capital based on the number of patents every one million R&D staff full-time equivalent. After this, this paper studies the impact of innovative human capital on CO2 emissions in China. The provincial panel data of 30 Chinese provinces from 2003 to 2017 is analyzed using the fixed effect, ordinary least squares, and the system generalized method of moments (SYS-GMM). The analysis revealed that innovative human capital alleviates environmental deterioration in China. The findings unfold the existence of the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) considering innovative human capital in the model. It implies that Chinese economic development will eventually support environmental sustainability if China continues to develop its innovative human capital. Among the control variables, economic structure, population density, and energy intensity stimulate environmental degradation by increasing CO2 emissions. However, FDI has a negative relationship with CO2 emissions. Lastly, the study proposes comprehensive policies to increase innovative human capital for environmental sustainability.

We present ASGriDS, an asynchronous Smart Grid simulation framework. ASGriDS is multi-domain, it simultaneously models the power network along with its physical loads/generators, controllers, and communication infrastructure. ASGriDS provides a unified workflow in a pythonic environment, to describe, run and control complex SmartGrid deployment scenarios. ASGriDS is an event-driven simulator that can run in either real-time or accelerated real-time. As it is modular and its components interact asynchronously, it can run either locally on a distributed infrastructure, also in hardware-in-the-loop setups, and on top of emulated/physical communication links. In this paper, we present the design of our simulator and we demonstrate its use with a generation control problem on a low voltage network. We use ASGriDS to deploy a realtime controller based on optimal power flow, on top of TCP and UDP based communication network, under various packet loss conditions.

Introduction Increases in recent times in electricity costs and in associated emissions of greenhouse gases are having an impact on societies to adopt business and lifestyle strategies based on sustainability practices. The emergence of the smart grid (Xinghuo et al., 2011) facilitates both suppliers and consumers of electricity in reducing carbon footprint and improving the reliability and efficiency of electricity generation, distribution and utilization. The smart grid unifies recent developments in the electrical power area with those in information and communication technologies (ICT) to bring to bear changes to business practices and life styles of consumers. The smart grid recognizes the distributed nature of electricity industry and the unifying power of the ICT. Traditional power grids consist of (i) large-scale electricity generators that are located within easy reach of energy resources, (ii) highvoltage transmission lines to bring bulk electricity to load centres that are close to loads, such as industries, cities, townships etc., and (iii) lower voltage distribution networks which in turn distribute electrical power to smaller consumers of electricity. Unlike such traditional power grids, smart grids have distributed energy generation that encompasses both centrally-located large-scale generators with ratings of 100's of megawatts (MWs) and many geographically distributed smaller generators of widely varying sizes from 10's of MWs that use fossil fuels and renewables to a few kilo watts (kW) that may be solar photo voltaic (PV) panels mounted on the roof of a small house. [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] Several geographically distributed power generators need to be integrated into the smart grid, recognizing the varying capacities, characteristics and technologies associated with generators (Figure 1). Electricity generated using renewable energy sources, such as photovoltaic (PV) solar panels and wind turbines, is variable depending upon the season, weather conditions and the period of any given day. This variability has a strong influence on the delivery of reliable power to consumers. Storage of electrical energy to dampen the effects of variability in the power from renewables is therefore an important aspect of the smart grid. Various types of energy storage: pumped hydro storage, batteries, fuel cells, flywheels etc. need to be integrated into a smart grid. Such distributed energy storages in the grid may serve different networks within the grid so that they continue to operate as self-powered islands during outages resulting from natural causes or system faults (Nourai & Keane, 2010). The electricity generated by solar PV panels and by some wind generators is in the form of direct current (DC). This DC power must be converted (or inverted) to make alternating current (AC) power to enable connection to an AC smart grid. Smart grids need smart inverters with controls to maximise renewable power utilization, and to supply power to either the local load and/or the grid (Xinghuo et al., 2011). The smart grid needs to integrate the action of generators, energy suppliers and customers. The smart grid must provide suitable multi-way communication of relevant information between various business actors associated with the grid. The smart grid includes even a small household as a business actor into its business model because a household contributes towards sustainable business outcomes. There are many research papers on smart grids with a focus on large power systems (Brown, 2008; Ipakchi & Albuyeh, 2009; and Farhangi, 2010) that emphasize the importance of pervasive control and monitoring requirements in a smart grid. They point out the convergence of ICT with power system engineering. There are also many publications (Guinard, 2011; Kamilaris, et al., 2011) that deal with energy management at household levels using the ICT strategy, such as Web of things. …

The concept of energy transition can be interpreted in different ways depending on the nature of the agent involved. However, practitioners and existing literature agree that a country’s energy transition is the variation of fossil fuel share in the total primary energy supply (TPES). Public policies mostly focus on changing the energy mix directly or indirectly. However, the production of fossil fuels depends mostly on market-related determinants, including prices and investment in the means of production. But what is the contribution of global energy transition? The objective of this paper is to estimate to which extent public policies related to energy transition affect fossil fuel production in producing countries. For this purpose, we consider as a proxy of energy transition the evolution over 40 years of the TPES of a large panel of fossil fuel–exporting countries, which we compare to its total primary energy production (TPEP). Moreover, we analyze these effects to determine if they differ according to country characteristics, such as its level of development or its membership in OPEC. Finally, we describe the long-run and short-run effects by studying separately the effects of production investments and those of R&D investments in RES technologies. The European Journal of Comparative Economics, Vol 17. no. 1, p. 5-30

Abstract In highly developed countries, a significant progress in the use of alternative and clean energy sources has recently been observed. The European Union has implemented a programme to build wind turbines. It is estimated that in the coming years, thanks to the support in tax and credit, the global energy will develop very intensively. Many components of the wind turbines are castings. The basic material used for these castings is ductile iron, which in this particular case must meet high requirements imposed by the operating conditions of wind turbines. Anticipating an increase in customer demand for this type of castings, Krakodlew SA has decided to modernize its foundry using the ability to obtain external financing. The ductile iron manufacturing technology is now being developed and adapted to the specific conditions of the foundry plant, including the melting process yielding cast material with the required chemical composition, the technology of moulding, and the conditions for possible secondary metallurgy, spheroidizing treatment and graphitizing inoculation. The fulfilment of the imposed conditions for the casting production demands the use of advanced casting technologies introduced to the manufacturing process. The development of technology to launch the production of ductile iron castings for the wind power industry was supported by The National Centre for Research and Development (NCBiR). This article presents part of research on the binding kinetics of furan resin sands and choice of their composition for moulds and cores to make heavy castings used as components of equipment for the wind power industry.

This paper takes Taoxichuan Cultural and Creative Street as a case study. It explores how enterprises activate the value of “industrial heritage” resources and achieve sustainable development from the perspective of affordance theory. Research findings indicated that: (1) the creation of a culturally recognized context performs a vital role in activating the industrial heritage; (2) the evocation of industrial heritage resources is a dynamic process from the realization of fundamental values to the actualization of high-level values; and (3) the evoked industrial heritage resources can achieve sustainable corporate development. Additionally, the research findings provide reference for enterprises to realize high-level values of industrial heritage resources by creating contexts to transform them into sources of innovation in the post-pandemic era.

Highlights •Biomass resource constraints impact the effectiveness of bioeconomy policies. •Bioeconomy policies may have an important impact on the sector structure in the long run, but the sector growth remains ultimately constrained by the availability of inputs. •Solutions to reduce the biomass constraint have to be included in innovation policy for the biobased economy.

This paper proposes a systematic framework to assess the complementarity of renewable resources over arbitrary geographical scopes and temporal scales which is particularly well-suited to exploit very large data sets of climatological data. The concept of critical time windows is introduced, and a spatio-temporal criticality indicator is proposed, consisting in a parametrised family of scalar indicators quantifying the complementarity between renewable resources in both space and time. The criticality indicator is leveraged to devise a family of optimisation problems identifying sets of locations with maximum complementarity under arbitrary geographical deployment constraints. The applicability of the framework is shown in a case study investigating the complementarity between the wind regimes in continental western Europe and southern Greenland, and its usefulness in a power system planning context is demonstrated. Besides showing that the occurrence of low wind power production events can be significantly reduced on a regional scale by exploiting diversity in local wind patterns, results highlight the fact that aggregating wind power production sites located on different continents may result in a lower occurrence of system-wide low wind power production events and indicate potential benefits of intercontinental electrical interconnections.