Life cycle cost of conventional,battery electric,and fuel cell electric vehicles considering traffic and environmental policies in China

Electric vehicles (EVs) are considered a promising alternative to conventional vehicles (CVs) to alleviate the oil crisis and reduce urban air pollution and carbon emissions. Consumers usually focus on the tangible cost when choosing an EV or CV but overlook the time cost for restricting purchase or driving and the environmental cost from gas emissions, falling to have a comprehensive understanding of the economic competitiveness of CVs and EVs. In this study, a life cycle cost model for vehicles is conducted to express traffic and environmental policies in monetary terms, which are called intangible cost and external cost, respectively. Battery electric vehicles (BEVs), fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEVs), and CVs are compared in four first-tier, four new first-tier, and 4 s-tier and below cities in China. The comparison shows that BEVs and FCEVs in most cities are incomparable with CVs in terms of tangible cost. However, the prominent traffic and environmental policies in first-tier cities, especially in Beijing and Shanghai, greatly increase the intangible and external costs of CVs, making consumers more inclined to purchase BEVs and FCEVs. The main policy benefits of BEVs and FCEVs come from three aspects: government subsidies, purchase and driving restrictions, and environmental taxes. With the predictable reduction in government subsidies, traffic and environmental policies present important factors influencing the competitiveness of BEVs and FCEVs. In first-tier cities, BEVs and FCEVs already have a competitive foundation for large-scale promotion. In new first-tier and second-tier and below cities, stricter traffic and environmental policies need to be formulated to offset the negative impact of the reduction in government subsidies on the competitiveness of BEVs and FCEVs. Additionally, a sensitivity analysis reveals that increasing the mileage and reducing fuel prices can significantly improve the competitiveness of BEVs and FCEVs, respectively.     

Patterns in environmental priorities revealed through government open data portals

The ways in which environmental priorities are framed are varied and influenced by political forces. One technological advance--the proliferation of government open data portals (ODPs)--has the potential to improve governance through facilitating access to data. Yet it is also known that the data hosted on ODPs may simply reflect the goals and interests of multiple levels of political power. In this article, I use traditional statistical correlation and regression techniques along with newer natural language processing and machine learning algorithms to analyze the corpus of datasets hosted on government ODPs (total: 49,066) to extract patterns that relate scales of governance and political liberalism/conservatism to the priorities and meaning attached to environmental issues. I find that state-level and municipal-level ODPs host different categories of environmental datasets, with municipal-level ODPs generally hosting more datasets pertaining to services and amenities and state-level ODPs hosting more datasets pertaining to resource protection and extraction. Stronger trends were observed for the influences of political conservatism/liberalism among state-level ODPs than for municipal-level ODPs.     

黑龙江省节水增粮行动(2012—2015年)实施方案

文章通过对黑龙江省高效节水现状,存在问题的分析,结合黑龙江省高效节水发展的支撑能力,阐述黑龙江省节水增粮目标、任务及总体布局,为黑龙江省2012—2015年节水增粮实施提供依据。     

Developing social impact assessment guidelines in a pre-existing policy context

Few jurisdictions have translated internationally agreed social impact assessment (SIA) principles into statutory provisions. Governments and regulatory bodies tend to provide developers with high-level frameworks, or require that social impacts be ‘considered’, without specifying how this is to be done. In Australia, this lack of clarity leaves all parties uncertain about requirements for SIA. The New South Wales (NSW) Government’s 2017 release of the SIA guideline for State-significant mining, petroleum and extractive industry development represents an attempt to clarify requirements and provide guidance. In this paper, we describe the process of bringing this guideline to fruition from the perspective of being directly involved in its development, and highlight the challenges involved in integrating leading-practice principles into the state’s pre-existing policy framework. While the guideline represents a significant advance in policy-based SIA guidance, some aspects leave room for improvement. The real test of the guideline’s impact will lie in its influence on SIA practice in NSW, and ultimately in social outcomes for communities affected by resources projects.     

Impact assessment of reservoir desiltation measures for downstream riverbed migration in climate change: A case study in northern Taiwan

Typhoon Aere in 2004 induced severe sedimentation and loss of storage capacity of the Shihmen Reservoir in northern Taiwan. The resulting dramatic increase in the turbidity of the water seriously affected the water supply. To effectively maintain the stability of the water supply and maintain the reservoir’s storage capacity, the government of Taiwan began to plan and construct a series of improvement measures, such as a sediment flushing tunnel, the JhongJhuang Bank-Side Reservoir, and the Amuping Desilting Tunnel. However, previous studies only focused on the impact of the sediment flushing tunnel and the Amuping Desilting Tunnel on the downstream riverbed, and did not consider the possibility of increasing sediment discharge after the completion of the JhongJhuang Bank-Side Reservoir. In addition, climate change will cause the intensity of extreme rainfall to increase enormously in the future. That rainfall and extra sediment flushing will challenge the existing flood prevention facilities. Therefore, this study considered that the JhongJhuang Bank-Side Reservoir will increase sediment discharge of the Shihmen Reservoir, and used dynamical downscaling extreme typhoon data of climate change under the RCP 8.5 scenario to explore the flood prevention and riverbed migration of the main channels of the Dahan and Tamsui Rivers in the future. We used the rainfall–runoff model of Hydrologic Modeling System to simulate rainfall and runoff, and used the hydraulic and sediment transport model of CCHE1D to holistically simulate flood events and consequent river scouring and deposition behaviors. Our results showed that the projected peak discharge during the late 21st century (2075 to 2099) will be at least 50% higher than that during the baseline (1979 to 2003) period. In terms of flood prevention, the potential of overbank flooding will increase in the downstream area, and the trend of long-term change in the riverbed will be dominated by degradation (-0.489 ± 0.743 m) in the future. The improvement measures will have a limited impact on riverbed migration (0.011 ± 0.094 m) in the Dahan and Tamsui Rivers. After the operation of the JhongJhuang Bank-Side Reservoir, the Shihmen Reservoir is expected to increase the sediment discharge ratio by 70% during floods, and it will not cause excessive water turbidity that may affect downstream water supply.     

Extending SSD Lifespan with Comprehensive Non-Volatile Memory-Based Write Buffers

Journal of Computer Science and Technology - New non-volatile memory (NVM) technologies are expected to replace main memory DRAM (dynamic random access memory) in the near future. NAND flash...     

Marginal cost and congestion in the Italian electricity market: An indirect estimation approach

In this paper we construct an indirect measure of the supply marginal cost function for the main generators from the observed bid data in the Italian electricity market in the period 2004–2007. We compute the residual demand function for each generator, taking explicitly into account the issue of transmission line congestion. This procedure allows recovering correct zonal Lerner index and the implied measure of the marginal cost function. We find evidence of a stable U-shaped marginal cost function for three main Italian generators, but a flat function for ENEL, the former national monopolist. The policy relevance of our approach lies in the possibility to offer some empirical knowledge of the marginal cost function of each generator to the regulator to design appropriate policy measures geared to the promotion of competitive market conditions. We propose a new market surveillance mechanism, which is based on the principle of sanctioning excessive deviations from the estimated measure of the marginal cost function presented in this work.     

How do different warning signs compare with the guideline daily amount and traffic-light system?

Nutritional warnings are rapidly gaining relevance, particularly in the region of the Americas, as a front-of-package nutrition labelling scheme that facilitate the identification of products with high content of nutrients associated with non-communicable diseases (NCDs). Several graphic designs are being developed as countries discuss the implementation of nutritional warnings, which makes it necessary to develop research to evaluate their efficacy. In this context, the aim of the present work was to compare the efficacy of a series of nutritional warnings that are being considered by Brazilian national authorities for the country with two of the most studied schemes: the guidelines daily amounts (GDA) and the traffic light system. Two studies were conducted. In the first one, visual search was conducted with 62 participants to evaluate the time needed by them to identify the schemes on food labels and to identify whether a product had high nutrient content. In the second study, an online survey with 1932 participants was used to evaluate their ability to use FOP nutrition labelling schemes to correctly identify the most healthful product in a set, as well as high nutrient content in a product. In addition, the influence of FOP nutrition labelling schemes on perceived healthfulness was evaluated. Finally, consumers’ perception of the schemes was gathered using an open-ended question. Results confirmed the advantages of nutritional warnings compared to the GDA and the traffic-light system to facilitate the identification of products with high content of nutrients associated with NCDs. In addition, the use of familiar signs frequently used to convey a ‘warning message’ outperformed other unfamiliar signs in terms of their ability to facilitate the interpretation of nutrition information. Regarding colour, black signs tended to required significantly less time to be detected when included on colour food labels compared to red signs.     

How to accelerate green technology diffusion? Directed technological change in the presence of coevolving absorptive capacity

The time window for effective climate change mitigation is closing. Technological change needs to be accelerated to limit global warming to a manageable level. Path dependence of technological change is one explanation for sluggish diffusion of green technologies. Firms acquire capital that differs by technology type and build up type-specific technological know-how needed to use capital efficiently. Path dependence emerges from cumulative knowledge stocks manifested in the productivity of supplied capital and firms’ capabilities. Increasing returns arise from induced innovation feedbacks and learning by doing. Relatively lower endowments with technological knowledge are a barrier to diffusion for new technologies. This paper shows how the evolution of relative stocks of technological knowledge explains different shapes of diffusion curves. Using an eco-technology extension of the macroeconomic agent-based model Eurace@unibi, it is shown how the effectiveness of different climate policies depends on the type and strength of diffusion barriers. Environmental taxes can outweigh lower productivity and subsidies perform better if lacking capabilities hinder firms to adopt a sufficiently mature technology.