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This paper addresses the effect of the increasing wind penetration on the operating performance of a diversified electricity system comprising wind, thermal, hydro and other renewable power plants. A short term optimization model is used to run the exploration planning under different wind power scenarios. The seasonality of the hydro and wind regimes and the hourly variations of supply and demand are acknowledged in the model. Simulations for the Portuguese electricity system are presented in order to establish the use of the proposed model on supporting more informed decision making for future energy strategies. The cost savings and CO2 abatement potential of wind power are estimated along with the effects on the operating performance and costs of thermal power plants. ; This work was financed by: the QREN – Operational Programme for Competitiveness Factors, the European Union – European Regional Development Fund and National Funds- Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology, under Project FCOMP-01-0124-FEDER-011377 and Project ...

The last two decades have experienced an increasing awareness about global warming, its causes, and potential effects on the ecosystem, in general, and on humankind, in particular. Global warming is nowadays recognized as one of the most impressive global negative externalities and market failures generated by the current economic system (Stern et al. 2006). In an attempt to safeguard against the risk of massive damage caused by a change in climate, the international, European and national institutions have committed to clear environmental goals aimed at stabilizing the global temperature at a non-dangerous level. In 2005, with the entry into force of the Kyoto Protocol, the ratifying Parties have committed to reduce by 2012 their emissions to 5.2% below the level of 1990. After having ratified the Kyoto Protocol, the European Commission (hereinafter EC) published the 2007 communication "Limiting Global Climate Change to 2° Celsius: The Way Ahead for 2020 and Beyond" in which it expressed its firm intention to enforce emissions reduction climate policies even beyond the terms of the Kyoto Protocol. At the end of 2008, the European Climate Package, which imposes a unilateral 20% emissions cut below the 1990 emissions level to be met by 2020, was finally approved.1

This Election Briefing Note aims to describe the key differences between the three main UK political parties on policies that might affect the ways in which individuals save and provide for the future, including the ways in which resources might be provided for retirement. Our main focus will be on policies that might affect future pensioners; IFS Election Briefing Note no. 11 explains how the different tax and benefit reform packages proposed by the different parties will affect people in the population in the short term, including current pensioners. We will also focus on areas in which the different parties have different policies.

China recognises the need to reduce carbon emissions in order to avoid negative consequences from climate change in the future. Therefore, the Chinese government initiated seven emissions trading system (ETS) pilots in 2013 and began to develop China's national ETS in 2017. However, Chinese efforts to implement ETS have encountered legal, institutional and political issues that must be solved so that a national ETS could help to mitigate emissions in China.

This article examines the question of whether international markets in allowances conferring the right to emit greenhouse gases are consistent with a cosmopolitan approach to global and intergenerational justice. After placing emissions trading within the context of both climate change policy and cosmopolitan political theory, three normative objections are examined to the use of emissions trading to mitigate the threat of dangerous climate change. Each objection arises from a different application of cosmopolitan thinking: (i) the potentially corrosive impact of greater use of emissions allowances markets on the environmental values of successive generations of atmospheric users; (ii) the awkward relationship between emissions markets and the norms of procedural justice endorsed by all prominent cosmopolitans; and (iii) the injustice expressed by policy instruments that commodify the atmosphere. It is argued that, while each objection should prompt some care in the construction and implementation of emissions trading schemes to guarantee their legitimacy among existing and future users of the atmosphere, they do not generate a decisive normative challenge to the use of markets, properly defined and regulated, to slow global warming.