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Abstract: This paper provides an overview of the evolving climate-change strategies put in place by industrialized countries to combat climate change and to comply with their quantitative commitments under the Kyoto Protocol. It links past policy performance with the historical level of greenhouse-gas emissions and with indicators of policy performance, such as energy intensity and carbon intensity, between 1990 and 2000. It presents the emerging new and integrated method of climate-policy formulation and implementation based on a portfolio approach, where a mix of policies and measures are selected to help achieve the required emissions reduction. The paper outlines the portfolios of policy instruments used by the industrialized countries in their evolving climate-change strategies and in their approach to widening the scope and increasing the coverage of those policy instruments to all sectors and all gases. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Projections of building electricity consumption are used in multiple fields and for a variety of purposes, from energy utility investment decisions to global climate assessments. Existing approaches to modeling building electricity consumption span a range of structural methodologies, spatial resolutions, and temporal scales, potentially leading to divergent projections. This paper compares how two models with different structures and resolutions respond to a common set of population and climate drivers in the western U.S. The BEND model simulates hourly residential and commercial building electricity consumption at the county scale by weighting the results of simulations of thousands of representative buildings. In contrast, the projected electricity demand in GCAM-USA is determined for each state, year, sector (residential/commercial), and service (e.g., heating, cooling, and others), based on population, income, technology, energy prices, and average annual climate. This paper aggregates the two models' results to a common resolution: annual residential and commercial building electricity consumption by state. Both models show similar responses to future projected population change and climate change, with population change having the larger impact between the two. Differences are primarily due to how the models capture changes in the aggregate energy efficiency of the building stock as it evolves over time. • Models of building electricity consumption are methodologically diverse. • Two models of building electricity using very different approaches are compared. • The models mostly agree in their projections of building electricity consumption. • How the efficiency of buildings evolves drives disagreement between the models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In recent years there have been several heat waves affecting the use of thermoelectric power plants, e.g. in Europe and the U.S. In this paper the linkage between hydro-climatic conditions and possible electricity generation restrictions is described. The coupling of hydrological models and a power plant model is presented. In this approach each power plant is considered separately with its technical specifications. Also environmental regulations, e.g. permissible rise in the cooling water temperature, are considered for the respective power plant. The hydrological models developed to simulate river runoff and water temperature are also site specific. The approach presented is applied to Krümmel nuclear power plant in Germany. Analysed are the uncertainties with regard to electricity generation restrictions on account of climatic developments and corresponding higher water temperatures and low flows. Overall, increased water temperatures and declining river runoff lead to more frequent and more severe generation restrictions. It is concluded that the site-specific approach is necessary to reliably simulate power plants water demand, river runoff and water temperature. Using a simulation time step of one day, electricity generation restrictions are significantly higher than for simulations at monthly time step. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: In this paper, we describe a method for constructing regional electricity demand data sets at 30min intervals, which are consistent with climate change scenarios. Specifically, we modify a commonly used linear regression model between regional electricity demand and climate to also describe intraday variability in demand so that regional load duration curves (LDCs) can be predicted. The model is evaluated for four different Australian states that are participants in the Australian National Electricity Market (NEM) and the resultant data sets are found to reproduce each state''s LDCs with reasonable accuracy. We also apply the demand model to CSIRO''s Mk 3 global climate model data sets that have been downscaled to 60km resolution using CSIRO''s conformal-cubic atmospheric model to estimate how LDCs change as a consequence of a 1°C increase in the average temperature of Australian state capital cities. These regional electricity demand data sets are then useful for economic modelling of electricity markets such as the NEM. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: There is a broad consensus that the costs of abatement of global climate change can be reduced efficiently through the assignment of quota rights and through international trade in these rights. There is, however, no consensus on whether the initial assignment of emissions permits can affect the Pareto-optimal global level of abatement. This paper provides some insight into the equity–efficiency puzzle. Qualitative results are obtained from a small-scale model; then quantitative evidence of separability is obtained from MERGE, a multiregion integrated assessment model. It is shown that if all the costs of climate change can be expressed in terms of GDP losses, Pareto-efficient abatement strategies are independent of the initial allocation of emissions rights. This is the case sometimes described as ‘market damages’. If, however, different regions assign different values to nonmarket damages such as species losses, different sharing rules may affect the Pareto-optimal level of greenhouse gas abatement. Separability may then be demonstrated only in specific cases (e.g. identical welfare functions or quasi-linearity of preferences or small shares of wealth devoted to abatement). [Copyright &y& Elsevier]