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Die energieintensive Industrie kann zum Ausgleich volatiler Stromeinspeisungen und somit zum Gelingen der Energiewende beitragen.
Digitalisierungsprozesse ermöglichen die Flexibilisierung der Produktion, wodurch die Stromnachfrage steuerbarer wird.
Gegenwärtig sind die Anreize zur Flexibilisierung jedoch für die meisten Unternehmen aufgrund von Investitionsunsicherheiten und der Konkurrenz durch konventionelle Kraftwerke gering.
Im Rahmen der Transformation des Energiesystems und zunehmender Digitalisierung der Produktion wird die Flexibilisierung für Industrieunternehmen perspektivisch attraktiver.
Digitalisierung und Flexibilisierung haben Auswirkungen auf Beschäftigte. So werden bereits jetzt Tätigkeiten an eine Abschaltung von Anlagen zur Stabilisierung des Stromsystems angepasst.
Im Hinblick auf Digitalisierungsprozesse gilt es, Mitarbeiter frühzeitig zu beteiligen und Ängste sowie Anregungen der Beschäftigten ernst zu nehmen.
Die Akzeptanz von Veränderungsprozessen kann durch eine frühzeitige Einbindung der Beschäftigten und ihrer Vertretung gefordert werden.
Ein den Digitalisierungsaktivitäten entsprechendes Personalkonzept stellt sicher, dass Beschäftigte mit notwendigem Know-how ausgestattet werden.
Reflecting trends in the academic landscape of sustainable energy using probabilistic topic modeling
(2019)
Background: Facing planetary boundaries, we need a sustainable energy system providing its life support function for society in the long-term within environmental limits. Since science plays an important role in decision-making, this study examines the thematic landscape of research on sustainable energy, which may contribute to a sustainability transformation. Understanding the structure of the research field allows for critical reflections and the identification of blind spots for advancing this field.
Methods: The study applies a text mining approach on 26533 Scopus-indexed abstracts published from 1990 to 2016 based on a latent Dirichlet allocation topic model. Models with up 1100 topics were created. Based on coherence scores and manual inspection, the model with 300 topics was selected. These statistical methods served for highlighting timely topic trends, differing thematic fields, and emerging communities in the topic network. The study critically reflects the quantitative results from a sustainability perspective.
Results: The study identifies a focus on establishing and optimizing the energy infrastructure towards 100% renewable energies through key modern technology areas: materials science, (biological) process engineering, and (digital) monitoring and control systems. Energy storage, photonic materials, nanomaterials, or biofuels belong to the topics with the strongest trends. The study identifies decreasing trends for general aspects regarding sustainable development and related economic, environmental, and political issues.
Conclusions: The discourse is latently adopting a technology-oriented paradigm focusing on renewable energy generation and is moving away from the multi-faceted concept of sustainability. The field has the potential to contribute to climate change mitigation by optimizing renewable energy systems. However, given the complexity of these systems, horizontal integration of the various valuable vertical research strands is required. Furthermore, the holistic ecological perspective considering the global scale that has originally motivated research on sustainable energy might be re-strengthened, e.g., by an integrated energy and materials perspective. Beyond considering the physical dimensions of energy systems, existing links from the currently technology-oriented discourse to the social sciences might be strengthened. For establishing sustainable energy systems, future research will not only have to target the technical energy infrastructure but put a stronger focus on issues perceivable from a holistic second-order perspective.
Responsible consumption and production is one of the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations. To achieve this goal the currently high extraction rates of natural resources, that our economy is based on, needs a transformation of the consumption and production system considering technological as well as social change. One of the promising transition approaches is seen in collaborative consumption with its many facets of socio-cultural innovations and fast growing number of participants and businesses. With a decreasing production of goods, due to a utilisation of underutilised assets, these offers might support an absolute reduction of the global resource use. However, a positive environmental effect depends on the setting and the social practices of such sharing offers and is not sustainable or resource efficient generally. Also, resource efficient practices with a low diffusion potential that stick in a niche offer no leverage to achieve sustainable consumption patterns. Thus, this paper describes a mixed method approach to analyse the resource efficiency and diffusion potential of 20 sharing offers in the area of mobility, housing & travel and everyday objects in Germany. Results show that the overall positive environmental connotation of sharing offers cannot be confirmed. We identified five clusters of offers that are all treated to be differently when it comes to deploying the positive potential and avoid unnecessary societal effort to achieve the mentioned Sustainable Development Goal.
Handlungsempfehlungen für die Verbraucherpolitik zur Förderung eines nachhaltigen Prosumierens
(2019)
Ein wachsender Teil der Gesellschaft sehnt sich beim Konsum zunehmend nach Vertrauenswürdigkeit und Individualität. Zwei Aspekte, die viele Konsumentinnen und Konsumenten im Massenmarkt vermissen. Das Konzept "Prosumieren", vorangetrieben von zivilgesellschaftlichen Initiativen wie urbanen Gemeinschaftsgärten, Foodsharing oder Repair-Cafés, bietet die Möglichkeit zu Partizipation und Empowerment der Verbraucherinnen und Verbrauchern, die damit nicht mehr nur einfache Konsumentinnen/Konsumenten sind, sondern zu Prosumentinnen/Prosumenten werden.
Die vorliegenden Handlungsempfehlungen richten sich vorrangig an die Verbraucherpolitik, doch betreffen sie auch etliche andere Ressorts, wie etwa Bildung und Verkehr. Ihr Ziel ist es, der Verbraucherpolitik die Bandbreite an Prosumptionsformen in den Feldern Ernährung und Bekleidung aufzuzeigen und ihr so einen Überblick zu verschaffen. Zugleich wird jedoch für ausgewählte Modelle im Detail auf die aktuellen praktischen Hürden sowie die Möglichkeiten eingegangen, diese abzubauen und das nachhaltige Prosumieren zu fördern. Schließlich wurde ein kurzer Leitfaden zur Bewertung der Nachhaltigkeitspotentiale von Prosumptionsmodellen erstellt, an dem sich die Verbraucherpolitik bei der Bewertung neuer Prosumptionsinitiativen, welche sich aktuell rasant verbreiten und immer neue Formen hervorbringen, orientieren kann.
Footprint calculators are efficient tools to monitor the environmental impact of private consumption. We present the results of an analysis of data entered into an online Material Footprint calculator undertaken to identify the socioeconomic drivers of the Material Footprint in different areas of consumption, from housing to holidaymaking. We developed regression models to reveal (1) the impact of socioeconomic characteristics on Material Footprints of private households and (2) correlations between the components of Material Footprints for different arrays of consumption. Our results show that an increasing Material Footprint in one array of consumption comes with an increasing Material Footprint in all other arrays, with the exception of housing and holidaymaking. The socioeconomic characteristics of users have a significant impact on their Material Footprints. However, this impact varies by the array of consumption. Households only exhibit generally bigger Material Footprints as a result of higher incomes and larger dwellings. We conclude that indicators which strive to monitor resource efficiency should survey disaggregated data in order to classify the resource use to different population groups and arrays of consumption.
Green Information Systems in general, and footprint calculators in particular, are promising feedback tools to assist people in adopting sustainable behaviour. Therefore, a Material Footprint model for use in an online footprint calculator was developed by identifying the most important predictors of the Material Footprint of the calculator's users. By means of statistical learning, the analysis revealed that 22 of the 95 predictors identified accounted for 74% of the variance in Material Footprints. Ten predictors out of the 95, mainly from the mobility domain, were capable of showing a prediction accuracy of 61%. The authors conclude that 22 predictors from the areas of mobility, housing and nutrition, as well as sociodemographic information, accurately predict a person's Material Footprint. The short and concise Material Footprint model may help developers and researchers to enhance their information systems with additional items while ensuring the data quality of such applications.
This assessment report identifies six key areas of sustainable consumption. Transforming those areas is associated with a significant, positive impact on sustainable development. In this way, those key areas lay the foundation to set clear priorities and formulate concrete policy measures and recommendations. The report describes recent developments and relevant actors in those six fields, outlines drivers and barriers to reach a shift towards more sustainability in those specific areas, and explores international good-practice examples. On top of this, overarching topics in the scientific discourse concerning sustainable consumption (e.g. collaborative economy, behavioural economics and nudging) are revealed by using innovative text-mining techniques. Subsequently, the report outlines the contributions of these research approaches to transforming the key areas of sustainable consumption. Finally, the report derives policy recommendations to improve the German Sustainable Development Strategy (DNS) in order to achieve a stronger stimulus effect for sustainable consumption.
The "fuzzy front end" of innovation is argued to be crucial for the success and sustainability impact of a final product. Indeed, it is a promising area of focus in efforts to achieve the United Nations' 2015 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which provide a globally accepted framework for sustainability. However, the usability of the 17 goals and the large number of sub-goals represent barriers to innovation practitioners. Moreover, this early innovation stage proves to be a challenge for corporate practitioners and innovators, largely due to the concept's intangible, qualitative nature and the lack of data. To help overcome these barriers, this article proposes a four-stage approach for structuring the innovation process using an online tool called the "SDG-Check", which help assess an innovator's sustainability orientation in the early phases of product and service development. It is a semi-quantitative tool to gather and combine assessments by experts involved in innovation processes with implications for the United Nations' SDGs. Furthermore, this article presents our first experiences in applying the SDG-Check based on three living lab innovation cases. The results indicate that the tools can support and inspire a dialogue with internal and external stakeholders with regards to sustainability considerations in the early design stages of product and service development.