In the transition towards a low-carbon future in Europe, cities' actions are of major importance due to the prominence of urbanization, both in terms of population and in terms of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. As a result, we need city authorities to act, by using their competences as policy...

If Europe is serious about climate change, it has to reduce its overall greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by 2050, thereby effectively going to a (near-) zero carbon energy and thus, electricity system. The European Climate Foundation, Eurelectric, and the International Energy Agency have...

In the transition towards a decarbonized energy system, we need city authorities to lead by example as public actors, to govern the actions of the private urban actors as local policy makers, and to conceive and manage the implementation of an integrated approach as coordinators, which we...

The European Commission has recently launched the Smart Cities Initiative to demonstrate and disseminate how to foster a quick transition towards local sustainable energy systems. Within this initiative, the three main challenges faced by pioneering cities, are to reduce or modify the demand for...

CO2 cap-and-trade mechanisms and CO2 emission taxes are becoming increasingly widespread. To assess the impact of a CO2 price, marginal abatement cost curves (MACCs) are a commonly used tool by policy makers, providing a direct graphical link between a CO2 price and the expected abatement....

The capacity credit is often erroneously considered to be a time-invariant quantity. A multi-year analysis of the incident wind profile of various potential wind sites uncovered that there exist large differences between annual capacity credit figures. The uniformity of these capacity credit...

Allocating wind farms across different locations in different countries may reduce the variability of hourly wind power changes. Taking into account cross-border transmission-capacity constraints between countries can however decrease the effect of this diversification. A portfolio-theory-based...

Due to the growing concern for global warming, the EU25 have implemented the European Union Greenhouse Gas Emission Trading Scheme (EU ETS). In the first trading period (2005–2007), part of the targeted GHG emission reductions presumably will have to result from a switch from coal fired...

The overlapping impact of the Emission Trading System (ETS) and renewable energy (RE) deployment targets creates a classic case of interaction effects. Whereas the price interaction is widely recognized and has been thoroughly discussed, the effect of an overlapping instrument on the abatement...