No abstract

No abstract

The scale and pace of energy infrastructure development required to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are unprecedented, yet our understanding of how to minimize its potential impacts on land and ocean use and natural resources is inadequate. Using high-resolution energy and land-use modeling, we developed spatially explicit scenarios for reaching an economy-wide net-zero GHG target in the western United States by 2050. We found that among net-zero policy cases that vary the rate of transportation and building electrification and use of fossil fuels, nuclear generation, and biomass, the “High Electrification” case, which utilizes electricity generation the most efficiently, had the lowest total land and ocean area requirements (84,000 to 105,000 km 2 vs. 88,100 to 158,000 km 2 across all other cases). Different levels of land and ocean use protections were applied to determine their effect on siting, environmental and social impacts, and energy costs. Meeting the net-zero target with stronger land and ocean use protections did not significantly alter the share of different energy generation technologies and only increased system costs by 3%, but decreased additional interstate transmission capacity by 20%. Yet, failure to avoid development in areas with high conservation value is likely to result in substantial habitat loss.

Access to electricity is limited in rural areas of Myanmar, where the majority of the population live.Myanmar‫׳‬s rich solar resource and the recent price drop in solar PV modules indicate initial suitability for rural solar electrification systems to meet the electricity demand. In many parts of Myanmar, women are responsible for supporting the family financially. The ability of rural women in Myanmar to take advantage of solar PV powered services to improve their lives depends on concurrent progress towards addressing the many dimensions of gender equality -empowerment, health, education, opportunity, voice, representation, and livelihood-in rural locations. This paper examines the barriers of solar PV applications and the potential for women led solar PV enterprise development in rural Myanmar. Although the entrepreneurial process is the same for men and women in theory, in practice different factors e.g. social/cultural, religion, economic and educational ultimately result in the disadvantaged status of women-led enterprises. Therefore, widespread and long-term eventuation of this potential in Myanmar depends on a government committed to renewable energy resources for rural electrification and to diligently and holistically addressing geographical, political, educational, financial, ethnic and technical barriers to the empowerment of a rural, female population.

Traditional discussions of the relationships between energy, CO2 emissions and human development capture between-country differences, but fail to expose within-country energy and CO2 emissions inequality. Household survey data offers researchers a window through which to better understand the unequal distribution of energy use and the Human Development Index (HDI) at a sub-national level. This study uses India Human Development However, the wealth creation needed to sustain a transition out of energy poverty appears to be accompanied by indirect CO 2 emissions growth, especially in the richest deciles. Addressing both of these challenges at the same time requires a coherent strategy that targets energy poverty and wealth creation in the poorest deciles while reducing the emissions intensity of the sectors -notably transportation -of the Indian and global economies supporting increasing household consumption.