Abstract
The European Union (EU) is adopting proactive strategies toward global decarbonization, proposing ambitious climate objectives to the international community, and adopting by itself ambitious energy and climate change objectives, as can be checked in its strategic packages for 2020, 2030 and 2050. As can be seen in these packages and in global climate and energy agreements, renewable generation is a key aspect to reach the global decarbonizing objectives. This chapter starts with a review of the very basic concepts of greenhouse gases emissions and its impact on climate change and summarizes the main objectives of the strategic EU energy packages and of the Paris agreement. It then focuses on methodologies for estimating the impact of renewable energies on greenhouse gases emissions reduction and reviews the reported EU related achievements. It also proposes a classification of EU countries in terms of Tapio decoupling states by analyzing and classifying the countries emissions intensities and its variation for a considered time period and analyzes the impact renewable energies had in that greenhouse gases emissions variations, in relation with other possibly relevant factors. The chapter ends with a summary of the expected evolution of renewable energies in the EU, and with the final conclusions.

Abstract
This work combines a detailed model of the electricity sector with a general equilibrium model for Spain, to analyze the effects of new investments and technological evolution in the electricity sector, as well as their impact in global aspects of the economy. A reference scenario with high prices for CO2 emissions together with insufficient investments in renewable energy was simulated, showing an expected negative economic impact. This scenario was then combined with five potential policies of economic reactivation. The most positive one was related to the reduction of the cost of access to capital, leading to improvements in capital income and GDP, thus mitigating the impact of the electricity price increase. This policy also leads to a migration of the labour from the production to the service sectors and suggests that a transition towards a cleaner electricity sector with minor economic impacts is possible, when energy policies are combined with adequate fiscal policies.

Abstract
Power systems of most EU countries will face substantial changes driven mainly by the EU Clean Energy Package and the expected increasing role of customers making use of demand response and distributed self-generation and self-storage resources (self-DG&S). This work aims to analyze the impact of these two factors on the long term evolution of both utility scale centralized generation and storage (CG&S), and self-DG&S. An hourly resolution generation expansion model based on cost minimization for CG&S and expenses' minimization for self-DG&S is used. Four case studies covering the period 2018-2047 for a real sized system (the Spanish one) are presented. Results highlight a strong synergy between battery costs and solar photovoltaic investments, while wind power seems to be better complemented by peaker thermal units.

Abstract
This paper analyzes the electricity prices of the MIBEL electricity spot market with respect to a set of possible explanatory variables. Understanding the main drivers of the electricity price is a key aspect in understanding price formation and in developing forecasting models, which are essential for the selling and buying strategies of market agents. For this analysis, different techniques have been applied in this work, including standard and lasso regression models, causal analysis based on bayesian networks and classification trees. Results from the different approaches are coherent and show strong dependency of the electricity prices with the Portuguese imported coal for lower non-dispatchable net demands, which has been progressively replaced by gas for larger non-dispatchable net demands. Hydro reservoirs and hydro production are also main explanatory variables of the electricity price for all non-dispatchable net demand levels.

Abstract
This paper estimates the profit of the joint operation of a wind farm and a li-ion battery energy storage system (BESS) in the Iberian electricity market (MIBEL). The day-ahead and first intraday energy markets, and the tertiary regulation market are considered to optimize the joint operation of both assets. A rolling window combined with a non-linear optimization model are used to design the operation strategy. The BESS lifetime (as a function of the depth of discharge) is considered in the optimization problem, and different BESS capacities and initial state of charge values are tested to determine their approximate optimum values. The model and strategy designed were tested using real data from the MIBEL market and predicted data from Sotavento wind farm. The resulting incomes were compared to the BESS investments costs to determine, for a given capacity, when the project becomes viable. © 2019 IEEE.

Abstract
Among conventional generation technologies in Spain, Combined Cycle Gas Turbines (CCGT) is the one that has experienced the largest development over the first decade of the 21st century. However, despite its promising future, multiple factors (such as the renewable generation increase, demand decline, adverse regulatory policies, etc.) have compromised their competitive position, reducing their capacity factor and undermining their financial viability. Because of those issues, electricity companies are giving up on new CCGTs investments, or even considering closing or mothballing some of their recently built plants. However, many still claim for the necessity of maintaining flexible backup technologies to cope with the variability of renewable energies, as a transition technology until energy storage or other future technologies emerge. This paper makes a profitability analysis of CCGTs in the Spanish electric power sector under different scenarios of RES penetration, carbon plants decommissioning, CO2 emission costs and EV penetration.