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This paper discusses a series of issues regarding the economic integration of intermittent renewables into European electricity markets. This debate has gained in importance following the large-scale deployment of wind farms and photovoltaic panels. As intermittent renewables constitute a significant share of the installed generation capacity, they cannot be kept isolated from the electricity markets. We argue that RES integration is first and foremost an issue of economic efficiency, and we review the main debates and frameworks that have emerged in the literature. we first consider to what extent intermittent resources should be treated the same way as dispatchable resources. we then analyse the different tools that have been proposed to ensure the required flexibility will be delivered: finer temporal granularity and new price boundaries, integration of a complex set of balancing markets, and introduction of tailor–made capacity remuneration mechanisms. Finally we introduce the topic of space redistribution, confronting crosscontinental markets integration to the emergence of a mosaic of local markets.

This paper attempts to verify whether we are moving towards a new paradigm of the network energy industry (electricity and natural gas), based on a wide decentralis ation of the energy supply. We do this by comparing the social benefits of decentralised and centralised mod els, simulating ideal situations in which any source of allocative inefficiencies is eliminated. This comparison focuses on assessing internal and external benefits. The internal benefits are calculated by simu lating the optimal prices of the electricity and gas inputs. The external benefits are estimated by applying the Extern methodology, one of the most recent and accurate approaches in this field. The paper reje cts the hypothesis that we are moving towards a new paradigm and points out how the considerable interest in the deployment of distributed generation (DG) is probably due to market distortions, in some cases, enforced by market reforms. In this respect, the paper reflects upon the real effectiveness of such reforms as well as the overall efficiency.

Biodiversity continues to decline in the face of increasing anthropogenic pressures such as habitat destruction, exploitation, pollution and introduction of alien species. Existing global databases of species' threat status or population time series are dominated by charismatic species. The collation of datasets with broad taxonomic and biogeographic extents, and that support computation of a range of biodiversity indicators, is necessary to enable better understanding of historical declines and to project - and avert - future declines. We describe and assess a new database of more than 1.6 million samples from 78 countries representing over 28,000 species, collated from existing spatial comparisons of local-scale biodiversity exposed to different intensities and types of anthropogenic pressures, from terrestrial sites around the world. The database contains measurements taken in 208 (of 814) ecoregions, 13 (of 14) biomes, 25 (of 35) biodiversity hotspots and 16 (of 17) megadiverse countries. The database contains more than 1% of the total number of all species described, and more than 1% of the described species within many taxonomic groups - including flowering plants, gymnosperms, birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, beetles, lepidopterans and hymenopterans. The dataset, which is still being added to, is therefore already considerably larger and more representative than those used by previous quantitative models of biodiversity trends and responses. The database is being assembled as part of the PREDICTS project (Projecting Responses of Ecological Diversity In Changing Terrestrial Systems - http://www.predicts.org.uk). We make site-level summary data available alongside this article. The full database will be publicly available in 2015.

"Market Coupling'' is currently seen as the most advanced market design in the restructuring of the European electricity market. Market coupling, by construction, introduces what is generally referred to as an incomplete market: it leaves several constraints out of the market and hence avoids pricing them. This may or may not have important consequences in practice depending on the case on hand. Quasi-VariationalInequality problems and the associated Generalized Nash Equilibrium can be used for representing incomplete markets. Recent papers propose methods for finding a set of solutions of Quasi-Variational Inequality problems. We apply one of these methods to a subproblem of market coupling namely the coordination of counter-trading. This problem is an illustration of a more general question encountered for instance in hierarchical planning in production management. We first discuss the economic interpretation of the Quasi-Variational Inequality problem. We then apply the algorithmic approach to a set of stylized case studies in order to illustrate the impact of different organizations of counter-trading. The paper emphazises the structuring of the problem. A companion paper considers the full problem of market coupling and counter-trading and presents a more extensive numerical analysis.