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Research Interests: Management, Environmental Geography, Corporate Governance, Sustainable Development, Development, and 11 moreIllusion, Blood, Business and Economics, Environment and Society, Clinical Sciences, Energy System, Energy transition, Environment politics, Complex Dynamics, Cardiovascular medicine and haematology, and Paediatrics and reproductive medicine
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Despite the widely recognized importance of users, consumers and citizens in sustainability transitions, transition studies offer highly fragmented perspectives that make it difficult to discern their various roles in sustainable... more
Despite the widely recognized importance of users, consumers and citizens in sustainability transitions, transition studies offer highly fragmented perspectives that make it difficult to discern their various roles in sustainable innovation. This paper therefore has two aims: (1) to clarify how users, consumers and citizens have been conceptualized in transition studies literature, and (2) to synthesize a typology of user, consumer and citizen roles. Because expert reviews tend to be highly selective and interpretive, we opted for a systematic literature review and compiled a set of 349 papers that refer user, consumer or citizen in their title or abstract, and also cite one of 100 ‘core publications’ in the transition studies field. To decrease bias and increase reproducibility, we use a systematic software-assisted content analysis that facilitates the disentanglement of multiple perspectives on a phenomenon of interest. It allows deep exploration of large collections of texts thr...
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Understanding the construction of protective spaces for biofuels in Sweden and the Netherlands
Research Interests: Engineering and Biofuel
Vulnerable groups, such as poor people in developing countries, are often hit hard by the effects of climate change since they lack the resources needed to cope or adapt to the changing environment. To conduct poverty reduction without... more
Vulnerable groups, such as poor people in developing countries, are often hit hard by the effects of climate change since they lack the resources needed to cope or adapt to the changing environment. To conduct poverty reduction without compromising on the environment, the Dutch government defined a variety of policy measures. One is the so-called Daey Ouwens Fund, established to implement small scale renewable energy projects in the poorest countries of the world. This Fund aims to contribute to Millennium Developing Goal 1, eradication of extreme poverty, and MDG 7, ensuring environmental sustainability. This paper describes the methodology developed to get a better understanding of the socioeconomic and environmental impact of projects to be implemented under the Daey Ouwens Fund. This methodology uses the multi level "Strategic Niche Management (SNM)" framework to systematically assess drivers and barriers crucial in process of innovation. For three selected projects, i...
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Abstract Recent developments in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and ongoing digitalisation processes play key roles in the energy transition. It is often argued that digital technology has the potential to empower citizens... more
Abstract Recent developments in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and ongoing digitalisation processes play key roles in the energy transition. It is often argued that digital technology has the potential to empower citizens and communities and thereby contribute not only to a more sustainable but also to a more democratic and fairer energy system. It is however unclear how the increasing number of frontrunner energy communities that enter the field of smart grids can benefit from these novel ICT solutions and meaningfully contribute to the sustainable energy transition. This paper explores how energy communities can mobilise ICT to enhance their agency in the energy transition. As part of a holistic multiple-case study approach, two energy communities were closely followed over a period of three years. Data were collected during project meetings and through semi-structured interviews. This paper observes that energy communities can mobilise ICT to change the way technology operates, strengthen collaboration to increase collective agency and, support their efforts in creating, disrupting, or maintaining institutions. The studied energy communities adopted a ‘fit and transform’ strategy in which they mobilised ICT to fit in the incumbent energy system in the short term, while aiming for transformation in the long term. ICT however also creates new challenges in the form of interoperability issues. This paper calls for more attention on the role of ICT when studying agency in unfolding sustainability transitions, especially in fields in which digital technology is believed to play a major role in the transformation.
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Verbong Geert. Paquier (Serge). Histoire de l'électricité en Suisse. Le dynamique d'un petit pays européen 1875-1939.. In: Revue belge de philologie et d'histoire, tome 78, fasc. 3-4, 2000. Histoire medievale, moderne et... more
Verbong Geert. Paquier (Serge). Histoire de l'électricité en Suisse. Le dynamique d'un petit pays européen 1875-1939.. In: Revue belge de philologie et d'histoire, tome 78, fasc. 3-4, 2000. Histoire medievale, moderne et contemporaine - Middeleeuwse, moderne en hedendaagse geschiedenis. pp. 1100-1102
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no abstrac
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... The gasifiers are produced by the firm Ankur. ... more ambitious project is the Biomass Energy for Rural India (BERI) gasifier project, conceived and developed by ASTRA, IISc Bangalore, Government of Karnataka funded by UNDP and GEF,... more
... The gasifiers are produced by the firm Ankur. ... more ambitious project is the Biomass Energy for Rural India (BERI) gasifier project, conceived and developed by ASTRA, IISc Bangalore, Government of Karnataka funded by UNDP and GEF, in the state of Karnataka (Sarkar, 2009 ...
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There is a growing interest in community-owned large-scale solar projects. However, if large amounts of electricity generated by these PV installations are not directly consumed by the local loads, grid congestion can arise, due to... more
There is a growing interest in community-owned large-scale solar projects. However, if large amounts of electricity generated by these PV installations are not directly consumed by the local loads, grid congestion can arise, due to constrains in the local electricity network. This paper explores when does grid congestion start to occur and whether battery storage systems can be an economically feasible solution to mitigate this problem, as an alternative to grid reinforcement measures. In addition, a proper sizing of the battery storage with respect to solar park nominal capacities is assessed, based on simulations and benchmark study of current practices.
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The SolarBEAT facility is an outdoor Research & Development infrastructure for innovation on BIPV(T). The facility is a cooperation between SEAC and the Technical University Eindhoven and is located in the Netherlands. It has been founded... more
The SolarBEAT facility is an outdoor Research & Development infrastructure for innovation on BIPV(T). The facility is a cooperation between SEAC and the Technical University Eindhoven and is located in the Netherlands. It has been founded early 2014 and has grown rapidly to its full capacity at the moment: a total of 6 projects are testing 8 different BIPV prototypes on one full year performance in realistic outdoor conditions. Performance (Ratio) is measured according to the norms and best practices. The secondary standard Solar Measurement Station is checked continuosly with the measurements of the nearby official Dutch meteorological institute (KNMI). Data is coming in flawless from more than 500 sensors. The daily data stream sums up to more than one million data points which are imported by a central relational (SQL-based) server. Much care is taken that every data point is synchronized with atomic time within 5 seconds, which makes a comparison between different projects possi...
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Summary Technological regimes are a common concept in innovation literature. We elaborate the concept of technological regimes in terms of rules. Rules tell actors how to behave, while at the same time their behaviour is a source for... more
Summary Technological regimes are a common concept in innovation literature. We elaborate the concept of technological regimes in terms of rules. Rules tell actors how to behave, while at the same time their behaviour is a source for rules creation. We distinguish different types of rules for different actor groups. These rules can be embedded in both variation and selection environment and they can be hierarchal. Our hypothesis is that rules will generally guide actors into historically grown paths and directions. They tend to favour the incumbent technology over radical innovations. Our two case studies, power generation from heat pumps and bio-gas production from manure, seem to confirm this hypothesis. Both, potentially radical, innovations failed in the Netherlands, while they succeeded elsewhere. The heat pump case clearly endorses our hypothesis that rules from the incumbent regime do guide the development of innovations into specific directions. In the manure digestion case, changing rules from the selection environment directly interacted with the variation environment. Also, the innovation process occurred within the context of multiple regimes. Overall, the notion of rules seems a promising approach to explain success or failure of radical innovations, but a more extended elaboration of the relative importance ofdifferent rules is still needed.
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ABSTRACT In the debate around solar photovoltaic (PV), the concept of ‘grid parity’ has emerged as the dominant benchmark for competitiveness, while some even argue that it will determine the point in time after which the PV industry will... more
ABSTRACT In the debate around solar photovoltaic (PV), the concept of ‘grid parity’ has emerged as the dominant benchmark for competitiveness, while some even argue that it will determine the point in time after which the PV industry will boom. But more recently, others have called into question the usefulness of the grid parity concept. Yet despite its pervasive use and increasing contestation, the grid parity concept has not been systematically interrogated to date. This paper makes two contributions towards that: first, to show how the grid parity concept emerged and how it is calculated and second, to explore the role of the grid parity debate in the solar PV field. The first contribution takes the form of a literature study of grid parity studies. To arrive at a meaningful estimation of the grid parity point, assumptions made in each step of the calculations have to be articulated and carefully evaluated. Nevertheless, this is almost never done: the grid parity studies, presentations and reports we reviewed invariably used the simplest representation available. We argue that their authors chose a simplified model for strategic reasons, e.g. to obtain (material and/or non-material) resources. This assessment leads to our second contribution: a discourse analysis of the grid parity debate. We distinguished ten key storylines and six discourse coalitions, comprised of actors who share a specific set of these storylines. Analyzing these storylines and coalitions, we show that while these actors share a common goal of PV up-scaling, they can have drastically different ideas about strategies to achieve this goal. Opening the black box of grid parity thus reveals tensions about preferred strategies in an otherwise seemingly homogeneous PV discourse.
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Research Interests: Smart Grid and Grid
Socio-economic trends are thought to cause a signif ica t change in the dominant type of electricity supply a nd consumption. The current operation of system servic s might become insufficient. In this work local syste m services (LSS),... more
Socio-economic trends are thought to cause a signif ica t change in the dominant type of electricity supply a nd consumption. The current operation of system servic s might become insufficient. In this work local syste m services (LSS), defined as actions performed at a l ocal evel to contribute to the technical and financial stabil ity of the system, are studied as a possible solution. Adaptat ions of the tariff systems will be needed, but legislation offers possibilities to implement these changes.
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Aims: This article explores the tank-to-wheel energy consumption of passenger transport at full adoption of fit-for-purpose shared and autonomous electric vehicles. Background: The energy consumption of passenger transport is increasing... more
Aims: This article explores the tank-to-wheel energy consumption of passenger transport at full adoption of fit-for-purpose shared and autonomous electric vehicles. Background: The energy consumption of passenger transport is increasing every year. Electrification of vehicles reduces their energy consumption significantly but is not the only disruptive trend in mobility. Shared fleets and autonomous driving are also expected to have large impacts and lead to fleets with one-person fit-for-purpose vehicles. The energy consumption of passenger transport in such scenarios is rarely discussed and we have not yet seen attempts to quantify it. Objective: The objective of this study is to quantify the tank-to-wheel energy consumption of passenger transport when the vehicle fleet is comprised of shared autonomous and electric fit-for-purpose vehicles and where cheap and accessible mobility leads to significantly increased mobility demand. Methodology: The approach consists of four steps. Fi...
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An urban mobility transition requires a transition in space allocation, since most mobility modes are dependent on urban open space for circulation and the storage of vehicles. Despite increasing attention to space and spatiality in... more
An urban mobility transition requires a transition in space allocation, since most mobility modes are dependent on urban open space for circulation and the storage of vehicles. Despite increasing attention to space and spatiality in transitions research, the finite, physical aspects of urban space, and the means by which it is allocated, have not been adequately acknowledged as an influence on mobility transitions. A conceptual framework is introduced to support comparison between cities in terms of the processes by which open space is (re-)distributed between car and bicycle circulatory and regulatory space. This framework distinguishes between regulatory allocation mechanisms and the appropriation practices of actors. Application to cases in Amsterdam, Brussels and Birmingham reveal unique relationships created by the zero-sum nature of urban open space between the dominant automobility mode and subordinate cycling mode. These relationships open up a new approach to forms of lock-...
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Aims: Exploring the impact of full adoption of fit-for-demand shared and autonomous electric vehicles on the passenger vehicle fleet of a society. Background: Shared Eutonomous Electric Vehicles (SAEVs) are expected to have a disruptive... more
Aims: Exploring the impact of full adoption of fit-for-demand shared and autonomous electric vehicles on the passenger vehicle fleet of a society. Background: Shared Eutonomous Electric Vehicles (SAEVs) are expected to have a disruptive impact on the mobility sector. Reduced cost for mobility and increased accessibility will induce new mobility demand and the vehicles that provide it will be fit-for-demand vehicles. Both these aspects have been qualitatively covered in recent research, but there have not yet been attempts to quantify fleet compositions in scenarios where passenger transport is dominated by fit-for-demand, one-person autonomous vehicles. Objective: To quantify the composition of the future vehicle fleet when all passenger vehicles are autonomous, shared and fit-for-demand and where cheap and accessible mobility has significantly increased the mobility demand. Methods: An agent-based model is developed to model detailed travel dynamics of a large population. Numerical...
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The literature on ethics and user attitudes towards AVs discusses user concerns in relation to automation; however, we show that there are additional relevant issues at stake. To assess adolescents’ attitudes regarding the ‘car of the... more
The literature on ethics and user attitudes towards AVs discusses user concerns in relation to automation; however, we show that there are additional relevant issues at stake. To assess adolescents’ attitudes regarding the ‘car of the future’ as presented by car manufacturers, we conducted two studies with over 400 participants altogether. We used a mixed methods approach in which we combined qualitative and quantitative methods. In the first study, our respondents appeared to be more concerned about other aspects of AVs than automation. Instead, their most commonly raised concerns were the extensive use of AI, recommender systems, and related issues of autonomy, invasiveness and personal privacy. The second study confirmed that several AV impacts were negatively perceived. The responses were, however, ambivalent. This confirms previous research on AV attitudes. On one hand, the AV features were perceived as useful, while on the other hand, their impacts were negatively assessed. We...
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Les pays-bas exploiterent les possibilites de l'uranium comme source energetique et developperent un reacteur nucleaire avec l'appui du gouvernement et des scientifiques
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L'une des consequences de la crise energetique est la recrudescence des moulins a vent aux Pays-Bas avec l'implantation d'un programme de recherche et developpement concernant l'energie du vent