In this paper, a flash flood that occurred in the Brazilian state of Santa Catarina in 2008 is used to investigate the existence of spatial spillovers from natural disasters in geographically‐linked areas. In order to do so, we estimated a Difference‐in‐Differences model that explicitly allows for the existence of spatial interactions within affected and unaffected regions. Our results show that municipalities directly affected by the flood suffered an 7.6% decrease in GDP per capita in the year of the disaster. Three years after the flood, however, GDP per capita rebounded back to pre‐disaster levels in all sectors but the Agricultural sector. Finally, our spatial estimations show that spillovers exist and are economically relevant.
Energy efficiency in buildings can be enhanced by several actions: encouraging users to comprehend and then adopt more energy-efficient behaviors; aiding building managers in maximizing energy savings; and using automation to optimize energy consumption, generation, and storage of controllable and flexible devices without compromising comfort levels and indoor air-quality parameters. This paper proposes an integrated Information and communications technology (ICT) based platform addressing all these factors. The gamification platform is embedded in the ICT platform along with an interactive energy management system, which aids interested stakeholders in optimizing “when and at which rate” energy should be buffered and consumed, with several advantages, such as reducing peak load, maximizing local renewable energy consumption, and delivering more efficient use of the resources available in individual buildings or blocks of buildings. This system also interacts with an automation manager and a users’ behavior predictor application. The work was developed in the Horizon 2020 FEEdBACk (Fostering Energy Efficiency and BehAvioral Change through ICT) project.
Growing number of inverter-based distributed energy resources (DERs) and sensitive loads increase the need for coordinated power management activities in islanded operation of microgrids. Especially low voltage networks have low inertia and high R/X ratio, causing instability due to fluctuations in distributed generation (DG) and local voltage problems in islanded operation. This study investigates management of DERs that operate in current mode for providing voltage regulation support to master unit(s) in islanded operation of microgrids. A special focus was set on local voltage issues in low voltage (LV) network feeders. Field experiments in a large test facility highlighted management accuracy and corrective impact potential of DERs connected to different parts of a feeder.
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