The Green Impact: How Renewable Sources Are Changing EU Electricity Prices
The European Union (EU) energy policy focuses on achieving a balance between three main pillars: increase the security of supply, reduce the impact of climate change, and improve economic competitiveness. To accomplish these objectives, the EU has been creating competitive conditions that internalize environmental externalities, and it has also actively promoted renewable energy.
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Social Challenges of Electricity Transmission: Grid Deployment in Germany, the United Kingdom, and Belgium
The European Union needs to decarbonize its energy generation to reach its goals of climate change mitigation and energy security policies. In 2011, the European Commission published a road map to reduce greenhouse gases (GHG) by at least 80% by 2050. The road map foresees five pathways, and, across all of them, renewable energy generation plays a significantly stronger role today. The deployment of renewable energy sources (RES ) to generate electricity is one possible option to decarbonize energy generation.
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Integrating Variable Renewables in Europe: Current Status and Recent Extreme Events
In recent months, energy policy in the European Union (EU) has started to focus on the concrete actions required to ensure the realization of a functioning internal energy market in the context of high levels of renewable energy in the post-2020 period. The most important developments include the agreement by the European Council on energy and climate targets for 2030 and the launch of the Energy Union by the European Commission in February 2015. European energy strategy will be strongly based on the development of variable renewables such as wind and PVs.
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Deploying Electric Vehicles Into Shared-Use Services: Amping up Public Charging Demand to Justify an Investment in Infrastructure
This past October, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a special report, “Global Warming of 1.5?C: A Summary for Policymakers.” A total of 91 authors and review editors from 40 countries worked on the report, basing their projections and conclusions on peer reviews and the more than 6,000 studies they examined. Lobbying by low-lying island states and others who were concerned that the assumptions and agreements from the Paris Climate Change Conference and Treaty might not be aggressive enough prompted the report’s creation.
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Changing Household Energy Usage: The Downsides of Incentives and How to Overcome Them
To combat climate change, the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) calculated that greenhouse gas emissions in the energy domain should be reduced by 90%, compared to 2010 emissions, between the years 2040 and 2070. In Europe, residential households consume about a quarter of total energy used (excluding the energy that is embodied in products). To contribute to the carbon emission reduction targets set by the IPCC , households need to reduce their fossilenergy use.
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