Serafeim Michas

Policy Highlights: To achieve the recommendation stated in the title, we propose the following: Equip key actors with the transformative capacities to support the development and implementation of regional visions, plans, and narratives. Develop structures and participatory mechanisms that encourage a wide social dialogue and citizen involvement in just transition projects. Use insights from science and practice from participatory processes, as well as methods and tools developed in different contexts, to enable just transitions. Involve local stakeholders in the intersectional analysis of compensatory measures for holistically mitigating negative impacts of policies or interventions. Make use of the full spectrum of SSH and STEM tools to support local transition processes.

Introducing carbon taxation could accelerate systemic change towards a decarbonised future. In this book chapter, we aim to test to which extent this policy can be considered a tipping intervention that can encourage fast green technological innovation and infrastructure development in coal and carbon-intensive regions (CCIRs) and how this policy affects the sectoral structure of the economy. We use a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model (ΜΕΜΟ) to assess the impacts of implementing a carbon tax on GDP and unemployment in Poland and Greece. These two countries are currently phasing out coal. Our results show that carbon tax implementation significantly affects the macroeconomic indicators and may also lead to considerable labour market effects on sectors other than mining, such as the light industry and construction in Greece and energy-intensive and advanced manufacturing industries in Poland. We also discuss funding and recycling revenue mechanisms that could enable the successful implementation of a carbon tax. We conclude that it would be more reasonable to treat carbon tax as an additional political tool that must be combined with other interventions coordinated with an overall broader full-system transformation narrative rather than a single tool that can determine or ex-ante detect any future tipping point.

Solar Photovoltaics (PV) is considered a highly competitive technology supporting the transition towards a low-carbon energy system. However, increased shares of its deployment have caused a set of mainly regulatory and financial challenges which require solutions. This paper identifies key research challenges for the further development and deployment of Solar PV, aiming to bridge the gap between expressed market needs and scientific research inquiries. The findings revealed a heterogeneous landscape of Research Priorities and Research Needs focused around the issues of renewable energy sources’ variability, the impacts of curtailment, material (re-)use and module efficiency, synergies with the cooling/heating sector, quality criteria and standardisation, as well as new support schemes and business models. These findings can be taken up by academic institutions or technology associations to shape further directions for research. Finally, a list of implications to guide potential end-users involved in the field of policy and practice is provided.

This paper presents the methodology and development tools employed to specify the path of an industrial robot in a virtual environment (VE) that is typically used for game development. Initially, the cell and the robot are designed and then imported into the VE, followed by the development of the kinematic chain of the robot. Forward and inverse kinematics analysis of the robot is accomplished, implemented in the C# programming language and embedded into the VE vie inbuilt functionality. The end-effector path consists of edges to be traced, such as in welding, deburring, water jet machining, etc. The path is planned in the VE using the teaching or lead-through paradigm, where instead of a teaching pendant the controller of a computer game console is used in connection with visual aids augmenting the VE to help the programmer. The robot path is, then, transcribed in the real robot, the pertinent code being derived automatically within the VE. The method was applied to a 6-axis industrial robot, the obtained V+ program was run on the real robotic cell and accuracy attained was documented proving that user friendly VR interfaces deriving from the gaming world can provide an efficient and effective robot programming paradigm.