This paper explores how municipal utilities (MUs) in Austria and Germany adopt and integrate the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) into their strategies, strategic projects and management controls (MCs). MUs have a long tradition of delivering public infrastructure services, such as energy, water, and public transport, in the two focus countries. As important municipal enterprises, MUs must position themselves on a continuum between their public mission and their business orientation, and therefore act in a financially sustainable manner. Taking SDG adoption seriously is in line with the public mission orientation. Drawing on legitimacy theory, the study investigates whether MUs engage with the SDGs symbolically or substantively. The research is based on nineteen semi-structured interviews conducted with representatives from sixteen MUs, allowing for an in-depth qualitative analysis of strategic alignment, project implementation, and related MCs. The findings reveal considerable variation in SDG integration, showing that most MUs are still in an early, emerging stage of adoption, which is still at a symbolic level. By providing empirical insights from two countries with long-standing traditions of municipal service provision by local government-owned public utilities, the study contributes to the limited literature on SDG adoption in municipal enterprises and enhances understanding of the legitimacy dynamics shaping SDG practices in local state-owned entities.
This study frames the prioritization of locations for decommissioning gas distribution system infrastructure as a geographic information system multi-criteria decision analysis (GIS-MCDA) problem. Within this framework, we identify several primary and secondary decision criteria that should be used to evaluate site suitability. We then describe a series of analytical methods by which publicly and private datasets can be sourced, transformed, and integrated to create geospatially explicit representations of these various site selection priorities. We demonstrated the application of this proposed framework for a Case Study area comprising the major investor-owned gas utility service territories throughout the State of California, aggregated to the census tract level. The development of this Case Study was informed by a series of stakeholder engagement and outreach activities that centered around a purpose-built web-mapping application which allowed for the collaborative exploration of geospatial data layers as well as the application of custom decision criteria weights to reflect different stakeholder value preferences. The study concludes with a discussion of the relative strengths and weaknesses of this approach within this problem domain and provides comments on additional datasets that could potentially improve its value to stakeholders and decision makers concerned with gas distribution system decommissioning project planning.
The UK's 2030 offshore wind targets are central to its decarbonisation strategy. Understanding the wider economy impacts of meeting them, and the conditions that shape those impacts, matters for investors, policymakers, and the energy regulator, which now carries a statutory duty to promote sustainable economic growth. Here, we consider the extent to which electricity system flexibility conditions the macroeconomic outcomes of offshore wind. We use UKENVI, a dynamic multi-sector computable general equilibrium model with a detailed representation of electricity generation technologies and of the flexibility with which the transmission system draws on generators of differing responsiveness. Offshore wind expansion is introduced through productivity improvements reflecting declining generation costs, combined with exogenous investment sufficient to meet capacity targets, and we compare two scenarios: (i) current grid flexibility, and (ii) enhanced flexibility through investment in storage and network infrastructure. We find that offshore wind expansion delivers positive macroeconomic outcomes under both scenarios, but that enhanced grid flexibility substantially amplifies these gains. Crucially, under the current flexibility constraints, curtailment and declining returns to capital limit utilisation and, in turn, the economy-wide benefits realised. Where flexibility is enhanced, greater utilisation of installed capacity is sustained alongside capital productivity, and we observe stronger increases in GDP, employment, wages and household consumption. These findings suggest that delivery of the capacity targets alone is unlikely to be sufficient, and that coordinated investment in grid flexibility is required if the full economic and environmental returns to deployment are to be secured.
Delhi, India faces a severe and multidimensional water crisis marked by a persistent supply deficit of approximately 2000 million liters per day (MLD), significant pollution of the Yamuna River, and rapid groundwater depletion of about 0.5–1.0 m per year. This systematic review, conducted using Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines, synthesizes findings from 94 studies published between 2000 and 2024 to examine the underlying drivers of this crisis and benchmark Delhi's performance against global Integrated Urban Water Management (IUWM) practices. The analysis reveals that the core challenge is not the absence of policies or technological options but a policy–performance gap rooted in fragmented governance and weak implementation. Multiple agencies with overlapping mandates hinder coordinated management of surface water, groundwater, wastewater, and stormwater systems. Although sewage treatment capacity has increased substantially from 600 to 3300 MLD, the treatment gap persists because wastewater generation has grown simultaneously, and much of the treated effluent remains unused due to limited reuse infrastructure and the absence of enforceable targets. High non-revenue water levels, ranging between 35 and 48 percent, further reflect persistent inefficiencies in distribution and demand management. Climate projections indicating greater hydrological variability are also insufficiently integrated into planning. By comparing Delhi with successful IUWM cases such as Singapore, Melbourne, and Spain's Guadalquivir Basin, this study identifies key performance gaps and proposes a phased roadmap emphasizing institutional integration, wastewater reuse, decentralized treatment, real time monitoring, and improved transboundary cooperation to enhance long term urban water resilience.
This paper adapts and applies the Risk-Informed Asset-Centric (RIACT) process to analyze the resilience of Hydro-Québec's electric power grid against extreme ice storm risks, when supplying the densely populated Greater Montréal area, one of the power system's major load centers. The goal is to avoid widespread or extensive outages and maintain the functional performance of the area's critical and essential services. This study adapts critical risks and asset exposures, and assesses potential resilience enhancement solutions, to be deployed on an electric power grid, based on the PERA resilience stages: i) Preparation; ii) Endurance (Absorption); iii) Recovery; and iv) Adaptation. The study provides insights into effective preventive measures while emphasizing the importance of monitoring, communication, and reporting in resilience management. The primary contribution is methodological, a streamlined, replicable RIACT–PERA integration demonstrated on a real-world utility case to enhance resilience planning practices for electric utilities facing extreme weather risks.
We estimate the effects of a major water infrastructure project in Benin on water access in communities historically exposed to water scarcity. We find that while this project initially involved boreholes in local communities only, it was noted for the integration of borehole-based water in some households. The project led to a 20-percent increase in in-house piped water supply. The increase in in-house piped water access was sizeable in urban areas but was insignificant in rural areas. However, rural areas did benefit from the project, as residents gained better access to public water piped to communal points outside their dwellings.
Local flexibility markets help manage the electrical grid cost-effectively by leveraging the power capabilities of demand- and supply-side resources. Within these markets, electric utilities use various types of contracts to gather the flexibility required from diverse mechanisms to maintain service quality. Thus, they can optimize contract configuration to reduce flexibility-provision costs while improving adequacy and security indexes in the electricity service. Specifically, in radial distribution circuits, utilities may purchase power-demand reductions from residential customers to address congestion at the feeder level. In this context, this paper presents a methodology to minimize flexibility costs for utilities, accounting for forward contracts and spot trades. To avoid baseline-definition complications, forward contracts specify an operating envelope at a unique price, whereas the spot market operates on voluntary bids from residential flexibility providers. The proposed method builds on Bayesian optimization to deal with the non-convex problem formulation. The analysis of different arrangements for residential customers indicates a significant savings opportunity in flexibility costs when acknowledging demand drivers. Detailed simulation results show that determining the efficient frontier facilitates utilities’ decision-making by relating expected costs to risk acceptance. Furthermore, they reveal a strong dependence of the flexibility portfolio’s cost on the residential customers’ preferences. These insights help integrate more flexible grid resources, such as distributed batteries, to achieve win-win deals between customers and utilities.
The fate of the energy transition hinges not only on having well-crafted policies in place but on their successful implementation as well. In some cases, such as heat planning, the implementation is highly localized and involves both public and private parties without clear hierarchies, as is typical of networked multi-stakeholder governance processes. Such processes are often characterized by difficult collective decision-making due to differing perceptions of challenges and priorities. Accordingly, mapping out the priorities and perceptual differences among stakeholders is an important prerequisite for maintaining effective governance. In this paper, we study the evaluation of challenges and success factors among municipalities and utilities in the context of heat planning in Germany, based on a survey of 267 participants. We identify an “inversion effect” when comparing the ratings of challenges and success factors: While municipalities perceive factors such as effective communication, clearly defined responsibilities and concrete measures and projects as more important than their utility counterparts, utilities see them as more challenging. We discuss the potential complications of such perceptual inversion for collective goal-setting and decision-making, and for the heat planning process more generally.
This paper presents a methodological framework for evaluating local energy transition processes through the Techno-Energy pillar of a Municipal Energy Transition Index, designed to support policy decision-making at the municipal level. The framework integrates diagnostic indicators, energy-efficiency improvements, and local resource potential into a unified structure that quantifies both current energy diagnosis and the achievable technical mitigation capacity of municipal energy systems. The methodology is structured around five pillars that collectively define the municipal energy transition, although this paper focuses exclusively on the techno-energy pillar, which formalises the assessment of energy flows and emission reductions. The approach is applied to a Mediterranean municipality, analysing current sectoral electricity demand, limited local generation, and associated emissions (124 kt CO2/year), while estimating the mitigation potential of efficiency measures and renewable-resource mobilisation. Three transition scenarios are evaluated. The Moderate scenario activates 35% of identified efficiency potential and 20% of resource potential, achieving a 55% reduction in emissions. The Ambitious scenario scales deployment to 45% and 25%, respectively, enabling a 70% reduction. The Neutrality scenario exploits the available technical potential (65% efficiency, 35% resources), reaching a configuration compatible with net-zero emissions. The results show that the proposed techno-energy pillar provides a consistent, scalable, and policy-relevant methodology to support policymakers in planning, prioritising, and monitoring sustainable energy actions, strengthening climate-policy alignment and evidence-based transition strategies.
As Renewable Energy Communities (RECs) mature, they require benefit allocation mechanisms that not only preserve economic efficiency but also support continuous member participation. Current dynamic allocation methods optimize for short-term economic efficiency but often fail to reward broader forms of loyalty, which in this work include long-term participation, flexibility provision, social engagement within the community, and commercial engagement with the REC promoter. This paper proposes a modular multi-stage optimization framework that integrates loyalty scores into the settlement process and compares four distinct mechanisms. Two models use an energy lever, modifying allocation coefficients to prioritize energy access for high-loyalty members: a strict cascade model and a hybrid model that introduces a safety net to balance meritocracy with social fairness. Two additional models use a direct benefit lever, preserving the community's global economic optimum: a revenue-neutral model that mimics cascade outcomes through ex post transfers, and a fixed-policy model that redistributes surplus through administrative rules. Simulation results for a 50-member community show that while direct-benefit mechanisms preserve collective economic optimality, rule-based policies can create stronger disparities, whereas energy-lever models embed incentives directly into energy allocation. A no-harm guarantee relative to the independent baseline is always enforced, ensuring that no member is financially worse off than operating independently. Overall, the proposed framework offers a configurable range of loyalty-allocation strategies, from stronger meritocratic differentiation to more protected equity, while preserving a modular architecture in which different upstream loyalty definitions can be combined with the same downstream allocation and settlement engine.
This paper examines how renewable-energy development is becoming part of electricity-sector transformation in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Iran. While renewable energy is often discussed mainly as a climate or diversification strategy, this article argues that solar, wind, and hydropower also serve utilities-policy functions in hydrocarbon-dependent economies. Through a qualitative comparative analysis of national strategies, major projects, electricity-sector institutions, financing conditions, and grid constraints, the paper shows that the three countries face similar transition pressures but follow different pathways.Saudi Arabia uses renewable megaprojects to support domestic electricity reform, fuel substitution, industrial localization, and hydrogen development. The UAE combines domestic renewable deployment with international clean-energy investment, storage integration, and Masdar's global project portfolio. Iran's pathway is more constrained by sanctions, limited financing, subsidy distortions, aging infrastructure, and electricity shortages, making renewables important for resilience, fuel saving, domestic capacity-building, and regional electricity flexibility.The paper argues that renewable projects should not be assessed only as generation assets. They are also instruments through which governments manage electricity demand, test procurement models, strengthen utility governance, improve grid resilience, and shape long-term energy planning. The comparison shows that successful renewable expansion depends not only on resource potential or targets, but also on credible institutions, bankable procurement, regulatory coordination, financing mechanisms, grid modernization, and infrastructure resilience.
Loss reduction and voltage profile improvement are among the main issues in the design and operation of power systems. In this paper, the optimal location and capacity estimation of photovoltaic (PV) panels and electric vehicle (EV) parking lots are carried out on two standard IEEE distribution feeders, namely the 33-bus and 123-bus systems, both with and without considering uncertainties. To solve the optimization problem, an improved version of the Flow Direction Algorithm (IFDA) is proposed. The optimization results are compared with those obtained from Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), Grey Wolf Optimizer (GWO), and the original Flow Direction Algorithm (FDA). Simulation results on the IEEE 33-bus and 123-bus distribution systems demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed IFDA. In the IEEE 33-bus system, the proposed method reduces feeder losses by 37.74% under deterministic conditions and by 30.43% when uncertainties are considered, while improving the voltage profile by 25.3% and 22.65%, respectively. Furthermore, in the IEEE 123-bus system, IFDA achieves the minimum energy losses of 923 kWh and 1045 kWh for deterministic and uncertain scenarios, respectively, outperforming PSO, GWO, and conventional FDA algorithms.
Electric Vehicles (EVs) have become a key component of modern powertrains, driven by advances in power electronics, energy storage systems, and control technologies. As renewable energy sources (RES) penetrate the grid, EVs not only consume energy but also serve as mobile energy storage units, supporting grid operations through bidirectional power flow. However, large-scale EV integration has introduced unavoidable technical challenges for power systems, including grid instability, charging infrastructure constraints, and power quality issues. This paper presents a comprehensive review of EV integration possibilities in future power grids, focusing on various charging methods and the advantages and challenges of each approach. The paper also highlights bidirectional energy transfer mechanisms, including vehicle-to-grid (V2G), Vehicle-to-Home (V2H), and Vehicle-to-Building (V2B), and critically analyses their role in enhancing grid flexibility and reliability. The impact of EV penetration on grid performance, including voltage instability, harmonic distortion, and energy management, is also discussed. In addition, the challenges of EV integration and solutions such as control strategies, smart charging, and coordinated energy management are examined. This review focuses on common EV-grid interaction scenarios and does not consider region-specific grid differences or special application cases. Finally, future research directions are outlined to facilitate the seamless, efficient integration of EVs into next-generation power systems. This review serves as a valuable resource for understanding the complex dynamics involved in EV integration and contributes to the development of a reliable, efficient, and environmentally sustainable power grid.
