Nowadays government policies to mitigate climate change are of a wide variety and they are evaluated before and after implementation. Much research has been conducted on how climate change policy will affect the climate. However, there is very little research on policies that are not intended to mitigate or reduce climate change and which, from the policy makers’ point of view, have no relation to climate change. The goal of this study is to review the electricity policy in Latvia and the aspects that can be evaluated under this policy, and apply multiple-criteria analysis to determine on what spheres the electricity policy leaves the most positive impact – is it climate or are they consumers and other electricity market players? The outcome of the analysis shows that, at the national level, the most positive impact on climate is provided by the National Energy and Climate Plan, indicating that climate is taken into consideration mostly only under complex multi-sectoral legislation.
Power demand-side management has been identified as one of the possible elements towards a more flexible power system in case of increased capacities of variable renewable energy sources—solar and wind energy. The market coordinators or aggregators are introduced to adjust the electricity consumption by following the market situation. However, the role of aggregators is mainly analysed from the economic perspective, and the demand side management is performed to maximise the utilisation of low price power during off-peak hours. However, this research focuses on analysing the introduction of aggregators as a future player to increase the total share of renewable power and decrease the surplus solar and wind electricity occurrence. An in-depth system dynamics model has been developed to analyse the hourly power production and power consumption rates at the national level for the Latvia case study. The results show that introducing aggregators and load shifting based on standard peak shaving can increase the share of surplus power and does not benefit from increased utilisation of solar and wind power. On the contrary, demand-side management based on available RES power can decrease the surplus power by 5%.
Nowadays the transport sector is one of the most challenging sectors in terms of reducing pollution produced in this sector. It becomes more and more clear that one of the best solutions for mitigating this pollution and the climate change linked to it is the usage of electrified railway. The aim of this article is to evaluate the impact that electrification of the railway will have on the environment from the perspective of pollution. The article shows a system dynamics model, which is based upon factors that affect a newly electrified railway. These include power demand, economics and the environmental impact originating from the railway. This model can be applicable for any country, however in this article Latvia is modelled as an example of how the model works and how the environmental factors will change as a result of an electrification of Latvia’ s railway system.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.