Africa's energy security remains fragile amid unreliable supply, high import exposure, and climate shocks, even as the continent pursues a low carbon transition. This study examines how climate-oriented finance and renewable energy deployment relate to energy security in 16 African countries from 2000 to 2021 using a Panel Vector Autoregression framework. To ensure conceptual clarity, external financial inflows, foreign direct investment and mitigation related development finance, are distinguished from renewable energy consumption as an energy system outcome. Energy security is measured using energy import dependence, energy intensity, and energy productivity. Results show that shocks to renewable energy consumption are followed by medium run improvements in energy intensity and productivity, alongside volatile short run dynamics. In contrast, foreign direct investment exhibits weak average effects in pooled models, becoming more evident when conditioning on institutional quality and income groups. Robustness checks using alternative finance proxies and stratified models confirm the main patterns. The findings are interpreted as time ordered dynamic relationships rather than structural causal effects. • Reframed abstract and introduction to foreground Africa’s energy security and financing constraints, linking strategy. • Expanded and structured contributions across theory, empirics, and policy, distinguishing finance flows and renewables. • Strengthened theory and empirics by integrating development and energy theories, synthesizing African literature, and justifying. • Improved transparency by motivating Panel VAR, comparing alternatives, and interpreting dynamics against theory and evidence.

The transformation of the electricity system towards higher shares of renewable energy necessitates increased flexibility on the demand side. The industrial sector, which accounts for over 40% of Germany's total electricity demand, exhibits significant heterogeneity in terms of production processes, load characteristics and grid use patterns. Consequently, it is considered a primary source of such flexibility. This study examines the economic and regulatory implications of deploying battery energy storage systems (BESS) in industrial settings, focusing on how different grid fee policy frameworks influence operational strategies, total costs of companies as well as their impact on grid operators. Using a mixed-integer linear programming model applied to more than 800 real-world industrial load profiles, we explicitly capture the diversity of industrial electricity demand and assess three regulatory scenarios: the current framework with incentives for atypical and intensive grid usage, and two proposed reforms incorporating dynamic energy prices and revised capacity prices. The objective of the model is a minimization of each company’s annual total costs, with the model deciding how many BESS modules should be built. Results show that BESS adoption leads to an average cost reduction in electricity procurement costs of 14.3%, with some companies reaching cost reductions of over 30%. At the same time companies that make use of atypical grid usage increase their maximum peak load on average by 51.7%, while the average grid fee payments are reduced by 41.6%. It is shown that by removing capacity price components of grid fees and by fully dynamizing energy price components, cost and grid fee payment reductions as well as peak loads are increased significantly. This raises concerns about unintended system effects such as increased network congestion or transformer overloading. In contrast, retaining capacity components supports more equitable cost allocation and reduces the risk of cross-subsidization, whereby smaller consumers subsidize larger, more flexible ones. These findings underscore the importance of cost-reflective grid tariffs that align network charges with underlying system costs, and incentivize grid-friendly behavior. From a policy perspective, economic efficiency ought to be balanced with potential distributional effects, taking into account temporal and locational price signals enabling the efficient deployment of industrial flexibility.

Climate change is causing a rise in global temperatures. High summertime temperatures can lead to overheating, where the temperature in homes becomes a risk to health and comfort. To reduce overheating in new residential buildings, a new part of the English Building Regulations, Part O: Overheating (‘Part O’) was introduced in 2022. This study evaluates the application of this new regulation to real-world projects. Semi-structured interviews were carried out with 30 experts across the construction and policy sectors. Experts identified that Part O has barriers to its application, including conflicts with broader parts of the building regulations, limitations in compliance modelling assumptions for passive and active technologies, a lack of futureproofing for rising temperatures, and inadequate assurance that homes designed to the regulations would be constructed to a high quality. To improve the use of Part O, this paper suggests recommendations for how the building regulations can minimise conflict, streamline processes, and support innovation to deliver heat resilient homes. This includes using academic evidence to better support technical modelling assumptions, and in the longer-term utilising upcoming modelling methodologies (Home Energy Model) to integrate Part O modelling with broader parts of building design and compliance requirements. To deliver a shift in high quality, heat resilient and net zero homes, this paper recommends a long-term shift in regulatory approaches to focus on absolute performance outputs, building audits and post occupancy evaluation. • Evaluation of Part O: overheating building regulations to support revisions. • Interview data gathered from 30 experts across construction and policy. • Barriers identified in application of Part O and broader building regulations. • Near-term recommendations to futureproof and improve assumptions. • Long-term recommendations to streamline regulations and audit homes.