Chuma Ebere (p), Sol Maria Halleck Vega, Bardia Mashhoodi, Eveline van Leeuwen

Omar Blanco-Arroyo

Beyond the double vulnerabilities in energy and transport poverty challenging the energy transition, grid poverty is less emphasised or most often mixed up. While energy poverty addresses unequal access to clean and affordable energy for consumption, grid poverty extends to the inequalities in the potential for energy generation and sharing due to fixed grid limitations. This creates triple energy vulnerabilities (TEVs), as energy communities (ECs) are unable to adopt distributed energy resources or properly access the grid. Furthermore, there can be geographical variation in TEVs.
This study first aims to elaborate on these TEVs, and what their implications are for ECs given that they can affect the potential for generating, saving and transporting energy. In doing so, the comprehensive literature review will cover urban-rural differences in these vulnerabilities. Next, the role of electric vehicles (EVs) is investigated since they provide a means for the flexible storage and transport of energy, minimising reliance on the fixed grid. In combination with ECs – mobile ECs – they can potentially help address TEVs, while also raising new questions about the multiscale implications. The second main aim of this study is thus to provide insights into the potential role of mobile ECs, offering a new perspective on the potential to both accelerate the energy transition and tackle TEVs.

Nuria Chaparro-Banegas (p), Alicia Mas-Tur, Filomena Maggino, Norat Roig-Tierno

Chuma Ebere

For many decades, innovation has been an instrument to increase economic growth and national competitiveness while addressing the sustainable development challenges that humanity faces. Innovations always have an impact on the society, economy, and environment where they are developed and implemented. In many cases, they can trigger disruptive changes in people’s lives, which may require a period of adaptation. The literature shows that innovation can have positive and negative effects on well-being. Some of the benefits derived from innovations are improvements in human development and life expectancy, facilitating the global green transition, and greater communication and access to information, among others. The negative effects are related to increases in inequality among individuals, stress and pressure, or environmental degradation. Therefore, which is the relationship between innovation and well-being? As this relationship has been mainly studied through econometric and survey analysis, this paper applies a Necessary Condition Analysis (NCA) to determine the necessary innovation factors that trigger national well-being. That is, identifying which innovation factors’ levels are needed to obtain specific life satisfaction levels. This methodology enables recognizing the innovation factors that constrain life satisfaction in a country. The findings of this paper demonstrate that institutional, social, digital, general infrastructure, environmental, and innovation linkages innovation drivers should be promoted to achieve higher thresholds of life satisfaction.

Omar Blanco-Arroyo (p), Simone Alfarano, Eva Camacho-Cuena

Nuria Chaparro-Banegas

This paper studies the negative relationship between CO2 emissions volatility and development. We decompose the variance of aggregate CO2 emissions growth into a sector-specific component, country- specific component, sector-country-specific component (and their covariances) and show that aggregate volatility is mainly driven by the sector-country-specific component in all countries. Then, we breakdown this component into the contribution of individual variances and comovements between sectors and find that the former accounts for a larger fraction than the latter. Finally, we document the sector-country- specific component falls with development because sectors’ CO2 emissions are on average less volatility and not because richer countries diversify.