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Waste heat from industry or urban facilities represents a largely underused and long disregarded energy source, while heating and cooling count for half the final energy demand in Europe. From the early 2010s onwards, waste heat recovery (WHR) is being recognized as a key challenge for energy transition and tends to be integrated into energy strategies at different levels. This paper provides an analysis of how WHR became a matter of public policy in Europe and in France. Based on a literature review, the analysis shows that WHR has been framed as a techno-economic problem, while some barriers (legal, organizational) to its development remain largely unaddressed. A study of European and French energy agendas illustrates how WHR progressively started to be recognized as an energy resource next to renewables. As a result, questions are raised as to further social science contributions to an extended research agenda addressing WHR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Widely advocated as a means to make policy making more integrated, policy assessment remains weakly integrated in practice. But explanations for this shortfall, such as lack of staff training and resources, ignore more fundamental institutional factors. This paper identifies institutional capacities supporting and constraining attempts to make policy assessment more integrated. A comparative empirical analysis of functionally equivalent assessment systems in four European jurisdictions finds that there are wide-ranging institutional constraints upon integration. These include international policy commitments, the perception that assessment should support rather than determine policy, organisational traditions, and the sectorisation of policy making. This paper concludes by exploring the potential for altering these institutions to make policy assessment more integrated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to propose an alternative approach for outlining policy responses to stimulate the automotive industry. The scientific community has developed and employed the Delphi method to collect and convey perspectives and impressions, and also define a number of financially viable proposals. The panel of experts takes the view that traditional industrial policy measures denote limited effects to stimulate car demand, in a context of a macro-economic downturn. By contrast, the panel also believe incentives for car demand are important for environmental purposes, for safety and for the diversification of energy sources. The policy measures proposed are fundamental from the viewpoint of overturning path dependencies in the automotive industry which impede the diffusion of alternative vehicles, with respect to business models and consumer attitudes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]