Energy Governance Research Articles

Humanising the Energy Transition: Towards a National Policy on Energy Poverty in the Netherlands

Energy poverty is emerging as a national agenda in the Netherlands. Local authority leadership and action on this agenda, and European Union reporting requirements around the energy transition have aligned to create an opportunity to establish a national agenda on this issue. Early action on energy poverty by local authorities stemmed from their recognition of the value of addressing environmental, health, social welfare and poverty goals through measures to address the problem. In contrast, the experiences of vulnerable energy consumers have limited recognition in national policy. Meanwhile EU requirements for climate reporting include a specification for measuring and monitoring energy poverty. This growing momentum has resulted in an emerging interest in energy poverty as a means to achieve a just transition at a national level, as reflected in the Dutch National Climate and Energy Plan. In this paper, we profile the case of the Netherlands, and outline the opportunity we see for the development of an energy poverty agenda in national energy transition policy, as part of a multi-level energy governance effort. We report on a national stakeholder workshop that we led, linking the lived experience of energy poverty in the Netherlands with policy solutions. Following the clear call for a national policy in this workshop, we also outline a strategy for engagement with energy poverty in the Netherlands, published recently in a white paper on this topic.

Trust in the Process: Renewable Energy Governance in Malaysia and Indonesia

Studies on renewable energy (RE) policies and policy making have generally focused on the Global North. This article homes in on how trust, an underexamined concept in the multi‐level governance literature, affects RE trajectories in Malaysia and Indonesia. Through comparative analysis, we find that different levels of trust result in similar degrees of RE policy support, but dissimilar degrees of engagement between state and societal actors in RE policy making. Negative expectations of the social grievances engendered by RE transitions contribute to reluctant, though legitimized, pursuits of clean energy production and consumption. Meanwhile, trust in actors' nationalism—that is, in opposing a Global North environmental agenda and demonstrating constitutionally aligned resource management in Malaysia and Indonesia, respectively—facilitates more inclusive policy making. Due to greater nationalism, Indonesia's state‐society engagement in RE governance is stronger and leads to a civil RE movement that outpaces Malaysia's overall.Related ArticlesAsh, John. 2010. “New Nuclear Energy, Risk, and Justice: Regulatory Strategies for an era of Limited Trust.” Politics & Policy 38 (2): 225‐284. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747‐1346.2010.00237.xKhodr, Hiba, and Isabella Ruble. 2013. “Energy Policies and Domestic Politics in the MENA Region in the Aftermath of the Arab Upheavals: The Cases of Lebanon, Libya, and KSA.” Politics & Policy 41 (5): 656‐689. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12033Wood, Steve. 2009. “Energy Security, Normative Dilemmas, and Institutional Camouflage: Europe's Pragmatism.” Politics & Policy 37 (3): 611‐635. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747‐1346.2009.00187.x

Factors influencing renewable energy generation development: a way to environmental sustainability.

Since renewable energy has the paramount importance of achieving environmental sustainability, developing countries like Pakistan have been facing numerous renewable energy generation (REG) development challenges. Thus, the REG development in any country can be attributed to its crucial drivers as well as crucial barriers. This work aims to identify crucial influence factors of REG development by conducting multi-facet content analysis as well as partial least square-based structural equation modeling analysis on data collected through a questionnaire survey. It has been conducted based on academicians from four Pakistani universities as well as professionals from Islamabad Electric Supply Company. The key outcomes are as follows: First, through multi-facet content analysis, ten crucial influence factors are identified. Among those factors, lack of good governance, renewable energy adaptation, and governmental energy policies are revealed to be the crucial barriers to REG development, whereas endowed resources, power production approach, renewable energy demand, investment environment for renewable energy projects, economic returns of renewable energy projects, environmental effects, and public acceptance are found to be the crucial drivers of REG development. Based on relative significance, the lack of good governance is unveiled to be the most significant factor, while environmental effects is found to be the least significant one. Moreover, among the drivers of REG development, public acceptance is found to be the prime contributor. At the same time, among crucial barriers, lack of good governance has shown the largest contribution to REG development.

Public agency and responsibility in energy governance: A Q study on diverse imagined publics in the Dutch heat transition

In Energy Social Science (ESS), the concept of imagined publics is used to describe how energy actors perceive societal groups around new energy technologies and projects. Findings indicate that imagined publics often build upon deficit assumptions; people are (unjustly) considered unknowledgeable, incapable, unwilling and irresponsible agents in governance. While insightful, deficit-based explanations insufficiently capture the broad diversity of publics imagined around energy system change.In this paper, we share the results of a Q-study, designed to systematically identify diverse imagined publics in the Dutch heat transition. We found five imaginaries:1. “Meaningful participation in a diverse society”2. “Strong and enthusiastic communities in the lead”3. “NIMBYs, social contestation and the threat to decarbonisation”4. “Collectivism & vulnerable groups at risk”5. “Unburdening individual user-consumers in the transition”.Each imaginary builds upon a different set of epistemic, action and normative assumptions, which construct public agency and responsibility in transitions in distinctive ways. We explore how these constructions come to justify roles and obligations for publics as well of other actors in the heat transition. One of our main contributions is that we explicitly move beyond the analysis of singular imaginaries as we consider imaginaries to be interactive, holistic, and contextual. In comparison, key social, ethical, and political tensions and trade-offs in the heat transition become visible.

Greening the Chinese Leviathan: China’s renewable energy governance as a source of soft power

This article examines China’s rapid and large-scale renewable energy expansion and the challenge it presents to orthodox approaches to sustainable energy diffusion that emphasise soft interventions and stakeholder participation. We show that China eschewed participatory modes of energy governance and pursued a centrally steered, hard interventionist strategy adapted to its non-democratic regime. We observe that China’s approach provides an alternative blueprint for development that is potentially attractive to some audiences. Drawing on recent soft power debates, we argue that China’s hard interventionist mode of governance in the renewables sector has the potential to enhance Chinese soft power both domestically and abroad.

Hierarchies, markets, and collaborative networks in energy governance: Multilevel drivers of renewable energy deployment

State renewable portfolio standard (RPS) mandates, competitive wholesale electricity markets, and cooperative regional transmission planning have all been identified as potential drivers of RE production. However, these factors are typically studied in isolation, and studies come to mixed conclusions about their actual effects on RE deployment. In this article, we a) use a novel “networks of action situations” (NAS) approach to examine the way that state RPS mandates, competitive markets, and regional transmission planning interact to jointly affect RE production; and b) ask whether these patterns differ across traditionally regulated and “deregulated” jurisdictions. We analyze and compare interactions between mandates, markets, and regional planning processes across two state-region dyads, both of which have achieved high levels of RE deployment but represent different institutional contexts. We find that RPS mandates are key drivers of RE deployment, but that these effects are realized through regional markets and planning processes. RPS mandates are similarly embedded in markets and networks in both cases with similar effects on RE production, but Minnesota's more traditional approach gives regulators greater authority over the type and location of RE production compared to Connecticut's more market-driven approach. Our analysis suggests that policy analysts should pay closer attention to the institutional environments in which policy instruments are embedded, and we offer several testable propositions about how mandate, market, and network interactions likely shape RE production.

EU climate and energy governance in times of crisis: towards a new agenda

ABSTRACT The EU has long pursued relatively ambitious climate and energy policies, often against the backdrop of what has been termed the EU ‘polycrisis’. This paper introduces a special issue which seeks to develop a better understanding of why, how and with which consequences the polycrisis and EU climate and energy governance have influenced each other. It draws on a novel framework of five broad crisis trends underlying the polycrisis. Most of the contributions suggest that EU climate and energy governance have advanced significantly despite, and sometimes even because of, the crisis trends. The countervailing effects of the trends and the effectiveness of actors’ strategies to advance EU policy against opponents go a long way to explaining this puzzling finding. As the EU seeks to fully decarbonise itself by 2050, interactions with the crisis trends are likely to intensify in ways which future research could fruitfully investigate.

From a liberal to a strategic actor: the evolution of the EU’s approach to international energy governance

ABSTRACT Most scholars have described the European Union (EU) as a liberal actor in its approach to international climate and energy governance. This paper argues that the EU has shifted to a strategic approach, including the use of legislation and the adoption of negotiating positions that promote a political agenda. This is illustrated through an analysis of the EU’s evolving stance on multilateral energy governance and its handling of the Nord Stream 2 project. The EU began to shift towards a strategic stance already in the 2000s, in the context of the Energy Charter Treaty negotiations and the growing securitization of European energy debates. Following the polycrisis of the mid-2010s, the EU adopted a full-fledged strategic stance on external energy policy. Geopolitical crises and great power competition, together with intra-EU divisions and an increased focus on the climate agenda, have catalyzed the EU’s shift to a strategic approach.

Influencing Factors of Logistical Operations Toward Economic Development and Environmental Regulations: Temporal and Spatial Evolution Mechanism

The interconnection of traffic infrastructure and the logistics industry’s efficient operation is a basis for the reconstruction of industrial spatial structure and economic optimization of the urban cluster. In this paper, the Undesirable-SBM DEA model was used to calculate the logistics eco-efficiency (LEE) of the five coastal urban clusters for 2009–2017, and the panel fixed-effect Tobit model was used to analyze the LEE evolution mechanism. Findings show that the overall score for LEE in China’s five coastal urban clusters is in a downward trend, and the gap in LEE between the cities is increasing. The temporal and spatial distribution of the LEE score has evolved from the pyramid structure of “the number of high-efficiency cities is the largest, followed by medium-efficiency in-between, and the least being low-efficiency cities” to the inverted triangle structure of “the number of low-efficiency cities is the largest, followed by medium-efficiency in-between, and the least being high-efficiency cities”. The evolution of the spatial distribution of LEE in various urban clusters shows heterogeneous characteristics. The cities with middle- and high-investment volumes of logistics resources are mainly the core and sub-core cities, but most of them have low LEE scores. The employee excess rate is the main reason for the loss of LEE. Energy prices and government intervention significantly and negatively affect LEE, while environmental regulations positively and significantly affect the excess of capital stock and employees. The impact of influencing factors, such as economic development and environmental regulations, on LEE and input excesses is different among the five coastal urban clusters.

Toward Regional Low-Carbon Energy Transitions in England: A Relational Perspective

Re-scaling energy systems and governance to the local level is increasingly necessary to transition to a low-carbon society. City region devolution in England enables city regions to develop their own approaches to low-carbon transitions that reflect the context in which they are situated. The approaches associated with these transitions support the localization of the energy system, the involvement of a diverse range of actors and institutions and the establishment of new supporting infrastructures. This paper considers the interactions between, and influence of, different actors, infrastructures and institutions and how these impact the nature of approaches developed by applying a relational perspective. Relational perspectives are increasingly prevalent in research on low-carbon transitions, although they have not been used to consider how different components of the transition influence the approaches developed—which is the focus of this paper. By understanding the influence of the different components, it supports the establishment of appropriate mechanisms to facilitate low-carbon transitions at the localized scale. This paper analyses the approaches to low-carbon transitions developed by three city regions with devolved powers in England. The approach developed by each of the city regions orientates around a different scale of focus—from the whole city region to strategic hubs to individualized, siloed activity. These different scales of focus reflect the influence held by the actors, institutions and infrastructures located within each city region. The context of the city region itself also influences the actors, institutions, and infrastructures present. By adopting a relational perspective, it unpacks the complex interrelations, the multiple points of interaction and influence, and the multi-scalar nature of low-carbon transitions at the city region level. Although the approaches to low-carbon transitions developed by the different city regions suggest a re-scaling of transition processes, the associated actors, infrastructures and institutions associated with these processes are not isolated from broader contexts and particularities of place. There are multi-scalar interactions and influences which impact the nature of approaches developed, demonstrating the value of relational and heterogeneous perspectives when developing localized approaches to low-carbon transitions.

A conceptual model identifying apartment owners' attitude formation towards solar photovoltaic (PV) adoption

PurposeThis paper addresses the current lack of solar photovoltaic (PV) adoption by Australian apartment dwellers by proposing a conceptual model that identifies and integrates the factors influencing owners' attitudes towards PV adoption.Design/methodology/approachThe conceptual model, which this paper terms the apartment-based solar adoption (ASA) model, is developed by applying motivation–opportunity–ability (MOA) theory to relevant findings in property development, green energy and strata governance literature.FindingsThe ASA model demonstrates the process by which an apartment-owning consumer may progress from considering solar PV adoption to recommending the action to their strata property's Owners' Committee (OC). It incorporates three motivational drivers (pragmatic considerations, perceived values and perceived social norms), three conditional mediators (location accessibility, resource availability and decision-making conditions) and three requirements from the consumer (actual and perceived knowledge, the ability to participate in decision-making and social connections and status).Research limitations/implicationsThis article contributes originality to research on two counts. Firstly, it provides a conceptual framework of specific relevance to issues concerning solar PV adoption, and secondly, it offers a systematic means for research into strata governance decision-making. Further research is required to develop the means with which to utilise the model prescriptively and measure longitudinal effects, such as ongoing trends in apartment owners' motivations. Further research is also recommended into how the ASA model may be utilised to identify generalisable consumer typologies among apartment owners.Practical implicationsThe ASA model may assist building maintenance providers in developing and marketing solar PV services tailored to apartment residents' requirements and enhance strata managers' ability to inform and guide apartment owners. In turn, property developers would be able to review apartment-based solar projects, measure their increased value and decreased energy costs and incorporate this information when planning future developments.Social implicationsThe ASA model may provide a template for apartment owners and owners' corporations considering solar PV for their property. Public policymakers could also refer to the model to incentivise apartment-based solar PV adoption, whether through designing local information campaigns, developing financial incentives or mitigating identified regulatory barriers. By facilitating solar PV adoption in Australian apartment housing, the model may ensure sustainable post-carbon energy consumption for Australia's housing stock and act as an example for high-density housing development internationally.Originality/valueThe ASA model addresses the many drivers and barriers known to affect solar PV adoption by apartment owners, presenting a framework on which to arrange these factors and outline their causal relationships. This framework may inform strata properties' future solar PV adoption initiatives by incorporating their specific physical characteristics, stakeholder dynamics and institutional structure. It also consolidates and provides generalisability to the concepts established in current literature.

Wind power projects in Brazil: challenges and opportunities increasing co-benefits and implications for climate and energy policies

The purpose of this article is to analyze the challenges to, and opportunities for, increasing sustainable development (SD) co-benefits delivered by clean development mechanism (CDM) wind power projects in northeastern Brazil and the resulting implications for climate and energy policies. Five methodological phases were met: First, a documentary research was conducted in the main CDM database; second was a literature review, creating the analytical framework and a survey questionnaire needed to assess the SD co-benefits from the projects; third, documentary research was used to enable ex-ante analysis of the SD co-benefits proposed in the CDM Project Design Documents (PDDs); fourth, survey allowed for the analysis of SD co-benefits perceived by project entrepreneurs (ex-post analysis); and finally, a comparison between the ex-ante and ex-post analyses was completed. The results show the importance of carrying out SD co-benefit studies after the implementation of CDM projects in order to learn lessons for new mechanisms of climate governance. The lowest SD co-benefits were water management improvement in the project influence area, soil pollution prevention, health and safety improvements and technology transfer. The greatest opportunities for increasing SD co-benefits come from the environmental licensing process and the strengthening of Corporate Social Responsibility. The greatest challenges are new technology development, stakeholders’ engagement and SD co-benefit audits. We conclude that the improvement of multi-level climate and energy governance plays a key role in increasing SD co-benefits.

Multimodal Data Based Regression to Monitor Air Pollutant Emission in Factories

Air pollution originating from anthropogenic emission, which is an important factor for environmental policy to regulate the sustainable development of enterprises and the environment. However, the missing or mislabeled discharge data make it impossible to apply this strategy in practice. In order to solve this challenge, we firstly discover that the energy consumption in a factory and the air pollutants are linearly related. Given this observation, we propose a support vector regression based Single-location recovery model to recover the air pollutant emission by using the energy consumption data in a factory. To further improve the precision of air pollutant emission estimation, we proposed a Gaussian process regression based multiple-location recovery model to estimate and recover the missing or mislabeled air pollutant emission from surrounding available air quality readings, collected by the government’s air quality monitoring station. Moreover, we optimally combine the two approaches to achieve the accurate air air pollutant emission estimation. To our best of knowledge, this is the first paper for monitoring the air pollutant emission taking both a factory’s energy consumption and government’s air quality readings into account. The research model in this article uses actual data(10,406,880 entries of data including weather, PM 2.5, date, etc.) from parts of Shandong Province, China. The dataset contains 33 factories (5 types) and we use the co-located air quality monitoring station as ground truth. The results show that, our proposed single-location recovery, multi-location recovery, and combined method could acquire the mean absolute error of 8.45, 9.69, and 7.25, respectively. The method has consistent accurate prediction behavior among 5 different factory types, shows a promising potential to be applied in broader locations and application areas, and outperforms the existing spatial interpolation based methods by 43.8%.

Energy intensity convergence in Iranian provinces: evidence from energy carriers' consumption intensity.

Investigating the energy intensity convergence in Iran, as a country with very high energy intensity in the world, is important in order to assess whether the government's energy policies were effective to reduce energy intensity and its externality effects. This research investigated the convergence of total energy intensity and energy carriers' consumption intensity in Iran and whether the energy intensity in the provinces with high energy intensity has been converged to the provinces with low energy intensity. To that end, the Markov chain method was used to investigate the convergence of total energy intensity and energy carriers' consumption intensity in Iranian provinces from 2002 to 2016. The results indicated that there was club convergence in total energy, natural gas, electricity, and oil consumption intensity. Therefore, provinces with similar levels of energy intensity (e.g., high energy intensity and low energy intensity) converged to a unique steady state.

Behind‐the‐meter energy storage in China: Lessons from California's approach

AbstractBehind‐the‐meter (BTM) energy storage creates benefits for a large number of stakeholders, enhancing system operation, and mitigating the increase in peak demand, as well as offering potential income from arbitraging peak/off‐peak electricity tariff differentials, mitigating demand charges, and other ancillary service sources. The United States and China are among the leaders in development of energy storage, but these two countries are at different stages in terms of the storage policy landscape. The US system of federalism enables state‐level policy reform, and California has been leading the country for more than a decade with policy instruments addressing BTM storage. These policy instruments include procurement targets, financial incentive plans, as well as regulatory adaptations. Under China's centralized pattern of energy governance, the deployment of new technology largely relies on signals from the national level. The first standalone national‐level policy for energy storage was released in 2017, but major market barriers remain. This review draws insights from the experience of California, whose partially deregulated power market is relevant for China's ongoing market reform. In order to investigate whether the country's current market environment provides adequate opportunities for investors, this review outlines an investment analysis assessing the economics of BTM storage in China with different revenue sources. Results show that traditional revenue sources for BTM storage, namely price arbitrage and demand charge reduction, are inadequate to recover costs for investors in China. The review thus proposes policy recommendations for regulators in China aiming to further promote the deployment of BTM energy storage.This article is categorized under: Energy Infrastructure > Economics and Policy Energy Infrastructure > Systems and Infrastructure Energy Systems Economics > Economics and Policy

Exploring EU energy governance and policy under a demoi-cratic lens: citizen participation, output legitimacy and democratic interdependence

ABSTRACT This paper applies the demoi-cratic theory to EU energy governance and policy, and explores whether the demoi-cratic criteria of equal legislative powers between statespeople and citizens and the supremacy of multilateral law through participatory jurisprudence apply to EU energy affairs. More specifically, it zooms in on democratic pathogenies deriving from lack of citizen engagement in energy policy-making at national, transnational and supranational levels; the impact of the lack of citizen participation on the output legitimacy of energy decisions; and democratic externalities and their consequences in the energy realm. It concludes that energy policy-making fulfils neither of the demoi-cratic criteria. This is due to the top-down mode of EU energy policy, and the dual EU failure to benefit from citizen engagement in the design and implementation of energy policy, and to recognize and deal with the democratic externalities emanating from the heightened democratic interdependence within the EU.

The Dakota Access Pipeline in Illinois: Participation, power, and institutional design in United States critical energy infrastructure governance

The role of participation in US energy governance sits at the heart of ongoing contestation around the crude oil-bearing Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). Theconstruction of the 1,172-mile pipeline raised questions about the public’s ability to influence energy infrastructure development considered by the US government as “critical” to national security. While numerous scholars and courts have begun to question whether thefederalregulatory process that permitted DAPL sufficiently allowed for participation, less work has examinedstate-levelprocesses. In this article, we ask whether actors who participated in the regulatory process at the state-level had sufficient opportunity to influence the siting, permitting, and construction of DAPL. We focus on Illinois, analyzing the 2015 proceeding by the Illinois Commerce Commission (ICC) to permit DAPL. Drawing on fieldwork between October 2018 and May 2020, we argue the ICC regulatory process minimized the space available for pipeline opposition in three ways. First, the ICC is limited, in an institutional design sense, from integrating broad public opinion into its decision-making process. Second, as a function of its design, pipeline opponents required significant knowledge and resources to mount claims before the ICC. Finally, we contend that politically powerful interest groups, especially labor unions and industry stakeholders, shape pipeline politics in Illinois in ways that further limit avenues for formal opposition. Our work raises important questions about the impact of public participation in contemporary energy and environmental governance, as well as how democratic contestation surrounding oil pipelines can openspacefor resistance and transformativesocial change.

Taking energy democracy to the streets: Socio-technical learning, institutional dynamism, and integration in South African community energy projects

Energy governance is at a critical juncture: facing unavoidable change and also potentially restructuring the energy regime towards greater social justice, equity, and innovation. Energy democracy is a novel form of energy governance and an emergent social movement; as a concept, it may prove to be instrumental for assessing socio-technical energy transition pathways towards the goals of democracy and decentralisation. This paper considers four possible energy transition pathways towards energy democracy by analysing two ‘socio-technical experiments’ in South Africa. These ‘experiments’ are both community-based renewable energy projects: a mini-grid pilot project by the state-owned energy utility (Lynedoch EcoVillage), and an off-grid solar utility using solar home systems by a social enterprise (the iShack project). Certain challenges were unique to each case – Lynedoch’s primarily related to system design, while iShack’s were the result of dynamic real-world conditions – yet both struggled with battery management systems, institutional disconnect, bureaucratic obstacles, and growing pains towards community cohesion. We argue for an expanded understanding of the four pathways to possible energy futures, taking into consideration the lessons and opportunities arising from these experiments, particularly regarding the advancement of technological innovation and the corresponding impacts at the neighbourhood level. Although the two socio-technical experiments discussed in this paper are micro-level interventions in South Africa, they contribute to the broader debate on sub-Saharan African energy democracy.

Da li nam treba više ambicije za tranziciju na obnovlјive izvore u Srbiji? Temelјi upravlјanja i planiranja energije

Renewable energy has been suggested as the primary approach for decarbonizing the energy system and decoupling energy consumption from greenhouse gas emissions, both in the energy literature and in practice. The European Union has acknowledged the challenge and put renewable energy transition high on the policy agenda with the latest ambition of being a carbon-neutral economy by 2050. On the other hand, Western Balkan countries are still dependent on fossil fuels as one of their primary energy mix sources. The pledge about the European future has mostly driven the renewable energy transition ambition in the Western Balkan countries, including Serbia. Moreover, signing the Energy Community Treaty provided institutional and legal tools to both Contracting Parties and the European Union to build the common energy market. These processes inspired many authors in the last two decades to analyse technical, economic, market and environmental aspects of renewables. However, the governance and planning, even though identified as challenging, have been side-lined from the analysis. This paper aims to overview the selected renewable energy transition literature and legislation to analyse the main legal and policy milestones reached so far, as well as ambition in Serbia. It also discusses the lessons learned from the related literature from energy governance and planning prism. To do so, it firstly provides a literature review of the main concepts of the renewable energy transition. Moreover, the historical analysis of renewable energy policy and legal developments in the European Union, the Energy Community and Serbia are in the second part's focus. Finally, the discussion part summarizes lessons learned from the literature for future energy governance and planning with the perspective of the energy planning process, policy evaluation, and education and administrative capacity. The article concludes by emphasizing the importance of taking the current literature findings as prospective steps to follow towards accelerated energy governance and planning.

Assessing Geological Resource and Risk Associated Radiation While Refining Opal Minerals Using Local Mechanism

The current study concentrated on the risk associated with naturally occurring radioactive materials in opal minerals and the method of refinement from the opal deposit site. The study's goal was to raise awareness of people who cause disease, improper use of expectations, and of better income generated in scientific ways. Radiation exposure has been associated with most forms of leukemia and with cancers of many organs, such as the lung, breast and thyroid gland, but not with certain other organs, such as the prostate gland. Mineworkers are exposed to radiation when extracting minerals from the earth's crust, with the associated radiological risks being assessed. Earth mineralogy is associated with environmental risks during mining and refining, particularly in certain aspects. Opal is most commonly found in Wollo, Ethiopia's northernmost region. The mechanism people used to refine opal Minerals at Wegel Tena often use rudimentary tools, such as a hammer and chisel, to extract the opal from the exposed seam along the flank of the canyon. The people living in Wogel Tena unknowingly export opal minerals to traders. Nowadays, the government's energy and mineral ministers are concerned about the preservation of tourist attractions and commercial centers using scientific methods. The local opal trader was unconcerned about people's safety or the diversion of mining resources. The new opal deposit was discovered in the village of Wegel Tena. Unlike previous Ethiopian opals, the new material is mostly white, with a little brown opal, fire opal, and a colorless "crystal" opal thrown in for good measure. When soaked in water, the opaque-to-translucent opals become transparent, showing a remarkable hydrophane character.