Energy policy failure is complex and to date there is a lack of a clear definition as society advances to a low-carbon world. Here a new definition is proposed, where energy policy does not meet ...local, national, and international energy and climate goals across the activities of the energy life-cycle and where just outcomes are not delivered. Energy policy failure is a major problem given the global aim of a low-carbon society, thus this paper conceptually sets out and defines energy policy failure in light of the energy transition, the 2015 Paris Agreement and the necessity of meeting energy and climate commitments. This conceptual research marks a first in connecting the current extensive energy justice literature with that of energy failure and under the premise of the climate emergency (announced by the United Nations in 2020). The direction here is both from a legal and an interdisciplinary perspective which is vital to energy research. The paper highlights the key literature on energy failures such as collapsed incentives, abandoned projects, mistakes, wrong paths, and bad decisions. It analyses some of the key causes and consequences of these energy policy failures, and aims to offer a solution for resolving them that meets the requirements of the just energy transition. At the heart of the paper's solution is the aim of furthering more fairness, equality, equity and inclusiveness into energy project decision-making, so that justice is at the centre of energy project development. Ensuring that this is the case will reduce a whole variety of project risks, result in successful project completion and reduce the possibility of energy policy failure, as society moves from the energy transition into net zero frameworks.
•The paper defines energy policy failure in light of the energy transition.•Energy policy failure is where energy policy does not meet societal goals.•Unjust outcomes demonstrate energy policy failure.•Energy justice can provide a clear framework for considering energy policy failure.•Researchers should become more involved in analysing energy policy failures.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
India is one of the most important global players in the energy sector in terms of production and consumption. The way in which the country shapes its energy policy not only affects India itself, but ...also the global climate action. On the one hand, India led by PM Narendra Modi declares the commitment to pro-climate actions, including the enhancement of the energy efficiency and renewable capacity. On the other hand, the development of India's conventional energy sector (coal) was indicated as one of the reasons for the US′ exit from the Paris Agreement. This dilemma lead to a discussion on the shape of India's energy policy, seen from the climate's standpoint. In this context, the article discusses the pillars of India's energy policy presented by Modi in 2016. The main energy pillars (access, efficiency, sustainability and security) are juxtaposed with the previous Indian strategic documents concerning the energy sector, including electricity (National Electricity Policy of 2005, Draft National Energy Policy of 2017). A climate-energy policy analysis is extended by legal comments on Indian energy law. As a result, the article draws a picture of India's energy policy and climate agenda in ‘black’ (conventional energy) and ‘green’ (renewable capacity) colours.
•On the one hand, India declares its pro-climate attitude.•On the other hand, PM Modi does not hide support for hydrocarbons, including coal.•Enhancing sustainability in India collides with ensuring energy access and energy security.•Usage of natural gas can be a ‘middle approach’ in Indian energy transition.
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This article acts as an editorial to a Special Issue that addresses energy policy failure which advances a range of solutions. These contributions and how energy justice specifically can address the ...issues are highlighted. Energy justice as a concept and with its five key principles of justice (distributive, procedural, restorative, recognition, and cosmopolitan) can contribute to transformative change which the articles demonstrate is already visible in some countries. This is highlighted here in this article with further examples in the case of the United States, Colombia, and South Africa. Further, given the scientific reports from the United Nations and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change there is now an urgency about reform. Societies need to meet their energy and climate goals for 2030 and 2050. Infusing energy justice throughout the energy sector will deliver this together with a safer, fairer, equitable, and more inclusive world. This aspiration should be the same across the world as the continued failure of energy policies is a global challenge where we are all ‘world citizens’ in the battle for a just transition to a low-carbon econmy.
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The paper covers regulating renewable energy communities (RECs) and citizen energy communities (CECs) within the European Union. It offers ideas regarding RECs: establish a register to tackle ...regulatory and administrative barriers, adopt RECs national/European goals, and introduce the exemplary role of national authorities in their promotion. It also discusses creating a separate support scheme for RECs (eg a tariff supporting small RECs and a separate tender for other RECs), brings elements of legal recognition of CECs (membership condition, operational condition and energy services condition), and answers whether renewable citizen energy communities are eligible under EU law (yes, they are).
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Agrivoltaics comprises solar energy generation and agricultural activities co-located to create multi-purpose agricultural solar energy systems. In 2021, the global agrivoltaics sector was valued at ...USD $3.6 billion and is projected to grow to USD $9.3 billion by 2031. Agrivoltaics projects have successfully attracted increasing investment and research demonstrating the technical, economic, and scientific rationale to advance agrivoltaics as a crucial technology to achieve net zero emissions goals. The legal framework enabling agrivoltaics development is at varying stages of maturity across different jurisdictions. This study provides the first socio-legal study of agrivoltaics development applying an energy justice framework. It comparatively analyses the mature agrivoltaics sectors, laws, and policies in Massachusetts (United States of America) and Japan in a functional comparative analysis with New South Wales (Australia) applying the three principal pillars of energy justice; recognition, procedural, and distributive justice. This study demonstrates how energy justice can generate a framework for regulatory reform. Such reform can facilitate the expansion of agrivoltaics and unlock the full potential of co-locating of solar energy and agriculture.
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•Agrivoltaics refers to co-location of solar energy on agricultural land.•Agrivoltaics will benefit from the application of energy justice.•Three key functions applicable to agrivoltaics are analysed.•Justice-driven framework can activate the full potential of agrivoltaics.
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Purpose
While fighting with the novel coronavirus will not be the main goal of sectoral regulators, different regulatory authorities join the struggle by providing a regulatory response. The purpose ...of this paper is to address this regulatory response in pandemic gathered around eight thematic areas.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper discusses the regulatory response in pandemic gathered around eight thematic areas, namely, the objectives, rules and standards, authorization and permits, procedure, monitoring and surveillance, enforcement, accountability and an institution presenting regulatory actions to tackle coronavirus (COVID-19) in reference to day-watchman type regulation.
Findings
Tackling the COVID-19 pandemic should be a knowledge-based approach (taking as much as possible from best available practices with respect to the novel coronavirus) with a framework of rules, standards, authorization, permits and guidance, monitored and enforced in a way adjusted to conditions of the pandemic, being as safe (as non-physical, as online) as possible, with suspended or extended deadlines, free of unnecessary administrative burdens. In this way, regulation should be pragmatic and flexible, as under the day-watchman model.
Research limitations/implications
In a post-pandemic regime, in the short run, the regulators should try to minimize the social and economic challenges faced by consumers and entrepreneurs. Among them, one may find scaling back, at least temporarily, the rules developed in non-disaster contexts. However, in the end, the post-disaster reforms tended to strengthen regulators’ hands, also under the deregulated government. The day-watchman type regulation balances both, as a middle ground approach, being a bridge between “a total subordination” and “a complete release.”
Practical implications
The disaster management (including public law regulation) provided by public authorities when tackling the effects of hurricanes, earthquakes or tsunamis can be a benchmark for regulatory responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. This concerns the support offered to entities and individuals affected by the negative consequences of reducing or stopping their businesses and staying in isolation.
Social implications
The day-watchman approach, visible in certain examples of public response to COVID-19 may serve as a framework for establishing a regulatory regime that would automatically take effect in case of another pandemic, limiting delays in regulatory actions, reducing non-compliance and accelerating recovery.
Originality/value
This study provides an analysis of different theories on public regulation addressing the notion of regulation using the day-watchman theory, which could be applied in regulatory actions during a pandemic. The paper discusses concrete steps taken by regulatory authorities worldwide, bringing examples from the USA, Canada, the UK, France, China, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. It juxtaposes the regulatory experiences derived from different catastrophes such as hurricanes, earthquakes or tsunamis with the regulatory response in a pandemic.
Test-field limit of metric nonlinear gravity theories Magnano, Guido; Meissner, Krzysztof A.; Sokołowski, Leszek M.
The European physical journal. C, Particles and fields,
07/2019, Volume:
79, Issue:
7
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
In the framework of alternative metric gravity theories, it has been shown by several authors that a generic Lagrangian depending on the Riemann tensor describes a theory with 8 degrees of freedom ...(which reduce to 3 for
f
(
R
) Lagrangians depending only on the curvature scalar). This result is often related to a reformulation of the fourth-order equations for the metric into a set of second-order equations for a multiplet of fields, including – besides the metric – a massive scalar field and a massive spin-2 field (the latter being usually regarded as a ghost): this is commonly assumed to represent the particle spectrum of the theory. In this article we investigate an issue which does not seem to have been addressed so far: in ordinary general-relativistic field theories, all fundamental fields (i.e. fields with definite spin and mass) reduce to test fields in some appropriate limit of the model, where they cease to act as sources for the metric curvature. In this limit, each of the fundamental fields can be excited from its ground state independently from the others (which does not happen, instead, as long as the fields are coupled through the gravitational interaction). We thus address the following question: does higher-derivative gravity admit a test-field limit for its fundamental fields? It is easy to show that for a generic
f
(
R
) theory (carrying 3 d.o.f.) the test-field limit does exist; then, we consider the case of Lagrangians depending on the full Ricci tensor, relying on a previous analysis published several years ago. We show that, already for a quadratic Lagrangian, the constraint binding together the scalar field and the massive spin-2 field does not disappear in the limit where they should be expected to act as test fields. A proper test-field limit exists only for a particular choice of the coefficients in the Lagrangian, which cause the scalar field to disappear (so that the resulting model has only 7 d.o.f.). We finally consider the possible addition of an arbitrary function of the quadratic invariant of the Weyl tensor,
C
α
β
μ
ν
C
α
β
μ
ν
, showing that the appearance of the Weyl tensor does not add physical degrees of freedom (in accordance to the known results for Lagrangians depending on the full Riemann tensor) and the resulting model with 8 d.o.f. still lacks a proper test-field limit: the differential constraints between the fundamental fields do not cancel out when gravitational interaction is suppressed. We argue that the lack of a test-field limit for the dynamics of the fundamental fields may constitute a serious drawback of the full 8 d.o.f. higher-order gravity models, which is not encountered in the restricted 7 d.o.f. or 3 d.o.f. cases.
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Poland has been praised for the development of onshore wind energy in recent years. This may be stopped by the act on the investments in wind power plants of May 2016. Seemingly it looks like a ...typical regulation concerning spatial planning. However, its provisions raise many controversies, as in practice it does not address running wind investments but rather blocking them. The new law eliminates several investment opportunities in terms of land for their construction (inter alia, because of a buffer zone enacted in the new legislation). These circumstances are highlighted in my paper in which I delve into the legislative process related to the investment act, providing analysis of the initial proposal and the current law in force, as well as listing the controversies and burdens imposed on the wind energy sector.
•The Polish act on investments in wind power plants is not a “pro-investment” legislation.•The Polish standard of a non-investment buffer zone is one of the most rigorous in Europe.•Wind investments should be based on an individualised, extended assessment of environmental impact.•It will be much harder to find ‘a right place’ in Poland to build and operate an onshore wind farm.
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Purpose
India is a fast-growing economy, that has a majority share in the global information technology industry (IT). Rapid urbanisation and modernisation in India have strained its energy sector, ...which is being reformed to cope. Despite being the global IT heart and having above average research output in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), India has not yet managed to leverage its benefits to the full. This study aims to address the role of AI and information management (IM) in India’s energy transition to highlight the challenges and barriers to its development and use in the energy sector.
Design/methodology/approach
The study, through analysis of proposed strategies, current policies, available literature and reports, discusses the role of AI and IM in the energy transition in India, highlighting the current situation and challenges.
Findings
The results show dispersed research and development incentives for IT in the Indian energy sector; however, the needed holistic top-down approach is lacking, calling for due attention in this matter. Adaptive and swift actions from policymakers towards AI and IM are warranted in India.
Practical implications
The ongoing transition of the Indian energy sector with the integration of smart technologies would result in increased access to big data. Extracting the maximum benefits from this would require a comprehensive AI and IM policy.
Social implications
The revolution in AI and robotics must be carried out in line with sustainable development goals, to support climate action and to consider privacy issues – both areas in India must be strengthened.
Originality/value
The paper offers an original discussion on certain applicable solutions regarding the energy transition of AI coming from the Global South; they are based on lessons learned from the Indian case studies presented in this study.
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