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This paper investigates the connection between climate change and energy security in Europe and provides empirical evidence that these issues are the two faces of the same coin. Using a panel of 39 European countries during the period 1980–2020, the empirical analysis presented in this paper indicates that increasing the share of nuclear, renewables, and other nonhydrocarbon energy and improving energy efficiency could lead to a significant reduction in carbon emissions and improve energy security throughout Europe. Accordingly, policies and reforms aimed at shifting away from hydrocarbons and increasing energy efficiency in distribution and consumption are key to mitigating climate change, reducing energy dependence, and minimizing exposure to energy price volatility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global energy consumption is growing rapidly, with the frequency and intensity of extreme events constantly increasing, posing a long-term threat to power supply and consumption. Therefore, analyzing the spatiotemporal characteristics of electricity consumption and quantitatively assessing the impact of extreme events on electricity consumption are of great significance. Based on fine-grained electricity consumption data from Europe for the years 2019–2022, this paper employs a data mining perspective and four methods including Z-score, Isolation Forest, Local Outlier Factor, and Autoencoder to detect abnormal electricity consumption during extreme events. Additionally, it combines indicators such as elastic loss, vulnerability, and duration to measure the impact of extreme events on electricity consumption. It is found that low temperatures could lead to abrupt changes in electricity consumption, with Northern Europe being more significantly affected by low temperatures. The COVID-19 pandemic had the most significant impact on electricity consumption in Europe, with the middle part of Europe being the hardest hit during the first wave of the pandemic. Electricity anomalies during the pandemic period were related to national pandemic control policies and exhibited some lag. High temperatures persisted for a longer duration in the middle part of Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The opening up of the railway to competition in Europe has been accompanied by many technical challenges never before seen in the railway field. One of these challenges concerns precise energy metering. As European railways have been a monopoly until now, the current systems can only measure the energy consumption of a single operator. In accordance with European law, the installation of an energy meter has been mandatory in new or refurbished rolling stocks since 2014. Nevertheless, these energy meters are still not fully reliable, with misreadings and missing readings being common occurrences. To address the problem of energy metering data reliability, this paper presents a method for validating the reading measurement based on a physical model and validates it in two different case studies. For the issue of energy metering data availability, different estimators are developed, and their performance are shown with the aim of calculating the missing consumptions for both case studies. Finally, the paper suggests how these methods may be implemented in other types of trains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Behaviour, practices and culture constitute a powerful human factor in the energy system; in particular the interactions between technologies, practices and norms lock individuals in to certain patterns of (often inefficient) energy use. Consequently, behaviour change has gained traction amongst policymakers as a key area of intervention given the impact energy-related behaviours have on climate change. Given the increasing emphasis within policy perspectives in the European Union, it is surprising that a gap in understanding of the success factors of behaviour change initiatives remains. This paper addresses this gap by identifying and characterising behaviour change initiatives across five European countries (the UK, Ireland, France, Italy, and Spain). The paper provides insights into the success factors and commonly encountered barriers to behaviour change initiatives. Initiatives are classified into 6 broad categories (community-based interventions; information and awareness based interventions; eco-districts; show-case events; energy switching; and smart-technology focused interventions). The results suggest that there are significant knowledge gaps between what is known to work to engage individuals in behavioural change and what is currently being applied in practice. An over-reliance on education and awareness-raising projects is evident, illustrating that such projects do not sufficiently aim for sustained behavioural changes. A dearth of projects incorporating fiscal measures, regulations or legislation to drive behaviour change reflects reluctance on behalf of decision-makers to engage widely with diverse approaches to foster lifestyle change. This paper contributes understandings of the different models and delivery tools employed to change energy-related behaviours; insights into the critical success factors that underpin best practice and the barriers to action; and a ‘what works in practice’ overview of the meaningful approaches to change behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper inaugurates the study of the energy-sustainable economic growth for Europe. It is novel both because it calculates an Index for Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW) index for European countries, but foremost because it compares the conventional energy-growth nexus with the newly appeared energy-sustainable growth nexus. Also, it goes further by suggesting ways to overcome the limitations pointed out to the use of the conventional GDP. The paper uses the road sector energy consumption, which is in accordance with the enormous discussion about the high energy intensity of the road transport sector and about the huge dependence from fossil sources of this sector. The dynamic Driscoll-Kraay estimator is also used, which allows decomposing the effects in the short- and long-run and is also robust in the presence of cross-sectional dependence. Results show that economic growth and sustainable economic welfare are not perfect substitute variables. In the long-run, the feedback hypothesis is verified only for sustainable growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many countries have some kind of energy-system transformation either planned or ongoing for various reasons, such as to curb carbon emissions or to compensate for the phasing out of nuclear energy. One important component of these transformations is the overall reduction in energy demand. It is generally acknowledged that the domestic sector represents a large share of total energy consumption in many countries. Increased energy efficiency is one factor that reduces energy demand, but behavioral approaches (known as “sufficiency”) and their respective interventions also play important roles. In this paper, we address citizens’ heterogeneity regarding both their current behaviors and their willingness to realize their sufficiency potentials—that is, to reduce their energy consumption through behavioral change. We collaborated with three Swiss cities for this study. A survey conducted in the three cities yielded thematic sets of energy-consumption behavior that various groups of participants rated differently. Using this data, we identified four groups of participants with different patterns of both current behaviors and sufficiency potentials. The paper discusses intervention types and addresses citizens’ heterogeneity and behaviors from a city-based perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we analyse infrastructure needs of the European natural gas market in response to decarbonisation of the European energy system. To this end, we use numerical modelling and apply the Global Gas Model. We investigate three pathways of future natural gas consumption: i) a decreasing natural gas consumption, following the scenarios of the EU Energy Roadmap 2050; ii) a moderate increase of natural gas consumption, along the lines of the IEA's New Policies Scenario; and iii) a temporary increase of natural gas use as a "bridge" technology, followed by a strong decrease after 2030. Our results show that current import infrastructure and intra-European transit capacity are sufficient to accommodate future import needs in all scenarios. This is despite a pronounced reduction of domestic production and a strong increase in import dependency. However, due to strong demand in Asia, Europe must increasingly rely on exports from Africa and the Caspian region, leading to new infrastructure capacity from these regions. When natural gas serves as a "bridge" technology, short-term utilisation rates of LNG import capacity temporarily increase instead of instigating large scale pipeline expansions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital technologies have the potential to make the transport system more connected, intelligent, efficient, reliable and sustainable. That is, digital technologies could fundamentally transform how people and goods are moved, with significant impacts on transport demand and on the related energy consumption and environmental impacts. This article proposes a scenario analysis for the future of European passenger transport, by evaluating the potential effects of digitalization on mobility demand, energy consumption and CO 2 emissions under different assumptions. The analysis illustrates that the penetration of digital technologies can lead to opposite effects with regard to both energy consumption and emissions. Two opposite scenarios are compared, to evaluate the effects of a "responsible" digitalization, in the direction of a sustainable mobility, against a "selfish" digitalization, where the final users maximize their utility. The likelihood of these two possible pathways is related to multiple drivers, including users' behavior, economic conditions and transport and environmental policies. Results show the variability range of the potential effects on energy consumption and CO 2 emissions in Europe by 2030 and 2050, by considering digitalization trends including Mobility as a Service, Shared Mobility and Autonomous Vehicles. The variability of key parameters is evaluated in a dedicated sensitivity analysis, where the effects of electric vehicles, electricity generation mixes and vehicles' efficiency improvements are assessed. The article concludes that in order to fully exploit the advantages of digitalization, proper policies are needed to support an efficient and effective deployment of available technologies through an optimized and shared use of alternative transport options. • The paper evaluates the effects on energy consumption of digitalization in transport. • Different scenarios allow comparing alternative digitalization pathways. • Digitalization needs a tailored policy support to avoid higher energy consumption. • A sensitivity analysis supports the discussion on the various aspects involved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many studies have investigated different aspects in the decarbonisation of the European housing stock. However, a comprehensive quantitative analysis of the literature on the diffusion of energy efficiency technologies is still missing. We conducted a bibliometric analysis to better understand the knowledge base in the field energy efficiency technology diffusion in the European residential building stock. After the scanning and screening process, we identified 954 scientific articles pertinent to this topic. Through a co-citation network analysis, we generated a visual knowledge structure of the field and by the further investigation of the bibliography we were able to synthesize the state-of-the-art and answer to our initial research questions. Results of the co-citation network show a scattered and fragmented field in many domains. The descriptive analysis highlights this fragmentation, especially on a cross-country level among EU country members. Findings from this study contribute to map the scientific knowledge base in relation to technology diffusion in European residential building projects, identify relevant topic areas, visualize the links between the topics, as well as to recognize research gaps and opportunities. The methodology utilized in this paper proved to be viable approach to map and characterize the knowledge base within a field and can, therefore, be replicated in upcoming studies with analogous ambitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]