Smart grids are rolling out internationally, with the United States nearing completion of a significant USD4-plus-billion federal program funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The emergence of smart grids is widespread across developed countries. Multiple approaches to analyzing the benefits of smart grids have emerged. The goals of this white paper are to review these approaches and analyze examples of each to highlight their differences, advantages, and disadvantages. This work was conducted under the auspices of a joint U.S.-China (...) research effort, the Climate Change Working Group Implementation Plan, Smart Grid. We present comparative benefits assessments of smart grid demonstrations in the U.S. and China along with a BA of a pilot project in Europe. In the U.S., we assess projects at two sites: the University of California, Irvine campus, which consists of two distinct demonstrations: Southern California Edison’s Irvine Smart Grid Demonstration Project and the UCI campus itself; and the Navy Yard area in Philadelphia, which has been repurposed as a mixed commercial-industrial, and possibly residential, development. In China, we cover several smart-grid aspects of the Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-city and the Shenzhen Bay Technology and Ecology City. In Europe, we look at a BA of a pilot smart grid project in the Malagrotta area west of Rome, Italy, contributed by the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission. The Irvine sub-project BAs use the U.S. Department of Energy Smart Grid Computational Tool, which is built on methods developed by the Electric Power Research Institute. The TEC sub-project BAs apply Smart Grid Multi-Criteria Analysis developed by the State Grid Corporation of China based on the analytic hierarchy process with fuzzy logic. The B-TEC and TNY sub-project BAs are evaluated using new approaches developed by those project teams. JRC has adopted an approach similar to EPRI’s but tailored to the Malagrotta distribution grid. (shrink)

This paper adopts a cognitive linguistic framework to explore the influence of spatial and social factors on the use of Spanish demonstratives esta ‘this’ and esa ‘that’. Twenty adult Spanish speakers in Monterrey, Mexico, were asked questions prompting the selection of puzzle pieces for placement in a 25-piece puzzle located in the shared space between the participant and an addressee. Although participants were not explicitly instructed to produce demonstratives, the need to identify specific puzzle pieces naturally elicited a total of (...) 523 tokens of esta and esa. Analyses of the distribution of esta versus esa show that demonstratives are not used in a categorical manner to mark differences in physical space. Although participants tended to produce proximal esta for referents near the speaker, both esta and esa were used for referents further from the speaker and closer to the addressee. Participants’ demonstrative selection was also influenced by interaction type: intersubjective misalignment between speakers promoted the use of proximal esta, whereas intersubjective alignment promoted the use of distal esa. These results support the view that nominal grounding is an intersubjective activity. Physical and social factors jointly shape speakers’ construal of the developing co-constructed communicative event as a whole, leading to increasingly variable usage of demonstratives as the referent is more distant both spatially and intersubjectively from the speaker. (shrink)