Climate change will likely impact wind and solar resources. As power systems increasingly shift towards wind and solar power, these resource changes will increasingly impact power system operations. We assess how power system operations will be affected by climate change impacts on wind and solar resources by generating wind and solar generation profiles for a reference period and five climate change projections. We then run a unit commitment and economic dispatch model to dispatch a highrenewable generator fleet with these profiles. For climate change projections, we use 2041-2050 output from five global climate models (GCMs) for Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5 for Texas, our study system. All five GCMs indicate increased wind generation potential by 1%-4% under climate change in Texas, while three and two GCMs indicate increased and decreased solar generation potential, respectively, by up to 1%. Uneven generation potential changes across time result in greater changes in dispatched generation by fuel type. Notably, nuclear generation decreases across GCMs by up to 7%, largely in low-demand (winter) months when nuclear plants, which have a high minimum stable load, must reduce their generation to avoid overgeneration. Increased wind and/or solar generation result in reduced system CO 2 emissions and electricity production costs across four of the five GCMs by 8-16 million tons and $216-516 million, or by 2% and 1%, respectively. Future research should assess the atmospheric and climate dynamics that underlie such changes in power system operations.

On 17 March 2020, the President of the European Council, Charles Michel, and the President of the European Commission (hereinafter, Commission), Ursula von der Leyen, announced further European Union (EU) actions in response to the COVID-19 outbreak. Since the pandemic reached Europe, the EU has adopted a number of trade-related measures, including the issuance of guidelines for national border management, as well as export authorisation requirements. On 14 March 2020, the Commission adopted “Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2020/402 of 14 March 2020 making the exportation of certain products subject to the production of an export authorisation”, temporarily restricting exports of “personal protective equipment” to destinations outside of the EU. On 14 April 2020, the Commission announced that it would narrow down export authorisation requirements to protective masks only and extend the geographical and humanitarian exemptions. Governments around the world have been implementing trade-related measures in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, some trade restrictive, but a number of countries have also called for the elimination of export controls and restrictions on essential goods. As the greater implications of the COVID-19 pandemic on trade are still difficult to assess, the emergency measures taken by affected countries already require legal scrutiny. At the same time, it must be noted that, as noted above for the EU measures, measures around the world are subject to change dynamically in view of the evolution of the pandemic.

As power systems shift towards increasing wind and solar electricity generation, inter-annual variability (IAV) of wind and solar resource and generation will pose increasing challenges to power system planning and operations. To help gauge these challenges to the power system, we quantify IAV of wind and solar resource and electricity generation across the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) power system, then assess the IAV of wind and solar electricity generation during peak-load hours (i.e. IAV of wind and solar capacity values) for the current ERCOT wind and solar generator fleet. To do so, we leverage the long timespan of four reanalysis datasets with the high resolution of grid integration datasets. We find the IAV (quantified as the coefficient of variation) of wind generation ranges from 2.3%-11% across ERCOT, while the IAV of solar generation ranges from 1.7%-5% across ERCOT. We also find significant seasonal and regional variability in the IAV of wind and solar generation, highlighting the importance of considering multiple temporal and spatial scales when planning and operating the power system. In addition, the IAV of the current wind and solar fleets' capacity values (defined as generation during peak-load hours) are larger than the IAV of the same fleets' capacity factors. IAV of annual generation and capacity values of wind and solar could impact operations and planning in several ways, e.g. through annual emissions, meeting emission reduction targets, and investment needs to maintain capacity adequacy.

On 26 June 2015, the Chilean Official Journal published Decree No. 13 of 16 April 2015 (hereinafter Decree 13/2015) amending Decree 977/1996 Reglamento sanitario de los alimentos (hereinafter, the Food Health Regulation, as it is widely referred to in English, although the correct translation would be Food Sanitary Regulation). In particular, Decree 13/2015 requires warning messages in the shape of a black octagon in the form of a STOP sign to be placed on the front-of-pack with the text ‘High in…’ when food products exceed certain levels of energy, sodium, sugars or saturated fats. Although novel in the food sector, Chile's measure is part of a trend of public policies aimed at tackling lifestyle risks by conveying certain information to the public. While warning messages that reduce the visual appeal of the packaging of products are ubiquitous in the tobacco sector, these types of messages are now also gradually being extended to the alcohol and food sectors.

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To discourage unhealthy eating and limit the population's intake of fatty foods, thereby alleviating the current obesity “epidemic”, an increasing number of countries across the industrialised world are considering levying taxes on unhealthy food. A “fat tax” may be defined as a tax or surcharge placed upon fattening foods, beverages or individuals with the aim to decrease consumption of foods that are linked to obesity. This is not an entirely new idea – some theorists, starting with Arthur Pigou, a 20th century English economist, have long presented the arguments for imposing special taxes on goods and services whose prices do not reflect the true social cost of their consumption. Examples of Pigouvian taxes are duties on cigarettes, alcohol, gambling and environmental emissions. Support for another such tax, a fat tax, is now spreading across the European Union. On 1 October 2011, Denmark introduced a tax on foods by targeting those products that are high in saturated fat. The Danish Act (hereinafter, Act) confirms the trend in various EU Member States to tax certain foods or consider taxing them in the future.

In this paper, we present SoDa, an irradiancebased synthetic Solar Data generation tool to generate realistic sub-minute solar photovoltaic (PV) output power time series, that emulate the weather pattern for a certain geographical location. Our tool relies on the National Solar Radiation Database (NSRDB) to obtain irradiance and weather data patterns for the site. Irradiance is mapped onto a PV model estimate of a solar plant's 30-min power output, based on the configuration of the panel. The working hypothesis to generate high-resolution (e.g. 1 second) solar data is that the conditional distribution of the time series of solar power output given the cloud density is the same for different locations. We therefore propose a stochastic model with a switching behavior due to different weather regimes as provided by the cloud type label in the NSRDB, and train our stochastic model parameters for the cloudy states on the high-resolution solar power measurements from a Phasor Measurement Unit (PMU). In the paper we introduce the stochastic model, and the methodology used for the training of its parameters. The numerical results show that our tool creates synthetic solar time series at high resolutions that are statistically representative of the measured solar power and illustrate how to make use of the tool to create synthetic data for arbitrary sites in the footprint covered by the NSRDB.