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Summary The integration of renewable generation and the electrification of heating and transportation are critical for the sustainable energy transition toward net-zero greenhouse gas emissions. These changes require the large-scale adoption of distributed energy resources (DERs). Peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading has gained attention as a new approach for incentivizing the uptake and coordination of DERs, with advantages for computational scalability, prosumer autonomy, and market competitiveness. However, major unresolved challenges remain for scaling out P2P trading, including enforcing network constraints, managing uncertainty, and mediating transmission and distribution conflicts. Here, we propose a novel multiscale design framework for P2P trading, with inter-platform coordination mechanisms to align local transactions with system-level requirements, and analytical tools to enhance long-term planning and investment decisions by accounting for forecast real-time operation. By integrating P2P trading into planning and operation across spatial and temporal scales, the adoption of large-scale DERs is tenable and can create economic, environmental, and social co-benefits.

An analysis of historical cost trends of energy technologies shows that the decades-long increase in the deployment of renewable energy technologies has consistently coincided with steep declines in their costs. For example, the cost of solar photovoltaics has declined by three orders of magnitude over the last 50 years. Similar trends are to be found with wind, energy storage, and electrolysers (hydrogen-based energy). Such declines are set to continue and will take several of these renewable technologies well below the cost base for current fossil fuel energy generation. Most major climate mitigation models produced for the IPCC and the International Energy Agency have continually underestimated such trends despite their being quite consistent and predictable. By incorporating such trends into a simple, transparent energy system model we produce new climate mitigation scenarios that provide a contrasting perspective to those of the standard models. These new scenarios provide an opportunity to shift the common narrative that a Paris-compliant emissions pathway will be expensive, will require reduced energy services or economic growth, and will need to rely on technologies that are currently expensive or unproven as scale. This research provides encouraging evidence for governments that are looking for greater ambition on decarbonising their economies while providing economic growth opportunities and affordable energy.

In the workhorse model of welfare economics, the elasticity of marginal utility, often denoted as η, serves simultaneously to represent aversion to risk, aversion to spatial inequality, and preferences for intertemporal substitution. While Kreps-Porteus-Selden and Epstein-Zin preferences enable risk to be separated from intertemporal substitution, no model enables all tlhree concepts to be disentangled. This theoretical lacuna is important, particularly for the economics of climate change, which is a global, long-run, uncertain externality. Much debate, for instance in the wake of the Stern Review (Stern, 2007a) has focused on the appropriate value for η. This paper tests the suitability of the workhorse model for climate change economics, by surveying the attitudes of over 3000 people to risk, time, and income inequality. The results show that individual attitudes to the three are only weakly correlated. This suggests that because the three concepts are captured by a single parameter, the model is underspecified and a richer model should be considered.

This briefing identifies key recovery policies that the UK government could introduce to both respond to the crisis of COVID-19, and support the country in meeting its commitment to reaching net-zero emissions by 2050.

The resonant interaction of surface acoustic waves and spin waves is a potential new tool to handle information. However, the natural precession frequencies of most ferromagnetic materials lie in the 10 GHz range, i.e. far above present common technology for surface acoustic waves. This feature restricts the range of materials of interest. To expand this range, we present here measurements of the acoustic attenuation and velocity, at room temperature, in epitaxial Fe on GaAs(001). Resonant coupling is observed in the sub-GHz regime by proper selection of the orientation and intensity of the applied magnetic field. With a very simple magnetization dynamics model that takes into account the softening of the magnetic precession modes, we are able to describe the observed salient features.