The use of non-renewable resources emits a high quantity of CO2 into environment, leading to a greenhouse effect, to reduce CO2 emissions all countries have shifted to use renewable energy sources. ...Therefore, this study re-examines the effect of renewable energy consumption on economic growth across 38 renewable-energy-consuming countries from 1990 to 2018. The dynamic ordinary least squares (DOLS), fully modified ordinary least squares (FMOLS) and heterogeneous non-causality approaches are applied. The empirical analysis confirms the presence of a long-run relationship between renewable energy consumption and economic growth. Further, we noted that renewable energy, non-renewable energy, capital and labor have positive impact on economic growth, particularly, renewable energy consumption has a positive impact on economic growth for 58% of the sample countries. The empirical results suggest that international cooperation agencies, energy organizers, governments, and associated bodies must act together in increasing renewable energy investment for low carbon growth in most of these economies.
•This study evaluates the impact of sustainable and non-sustainable energy sources.•It employs DOLS and heterogeneous non-causality approaches.•The study estimated a time-series analysis of long-run output elasticities.•Renewable energy has a positive and significant impact on economic growth.•Cooperation agencies must act together in increasing renewable energy investment.
Renewable energy, such as hydro power, photovoltaics and wind turbines, has become the most widely applied solutions for addressing issues associated with oil depletion, increasing energy demand and ...anthropogenic global warming. Solar and wind energy are strongly dependent on weather resources with intermittent and fluctuating features. To filter these variabilities, battery energy storage systems have been broadly accepted as one of the potential solutions, with advantages such as fast response capability, sustained power delivery, and geographical independence. During the implementation of battery energy storage systems, one of the most crucial issues is to optimally determine the size of the battery for balancing the trade-off between the technical improvements brought by the battery and the additional overall cost. Numerous studies have been performed to optimise battery sizing for different renewable energy systems using a range of criteria and methods. This paper provides a comprehensive review of battery sizing criteria, methods and its applications in various renewable energy systems. The applications for storage systems have been categorised based on the specific renewable energy system that the battery storage will be a part. This is in contrast to previous studies where the battery sizing approaches were either arranged as an optimised component in renewable systems or only accounted for one category of renewable system. By taking this approach, it becomes clear that the critical metrics for battery sizing, and by extension the most suitable method for determining battery size, are determined by the type of renewable energy system application, as well as its size. This has important implications for the design process as the renewable energy system application will drive the battery energy storage system sizing methodology chosen.
The United States and Germany started out with very similar policies for renewable energy after the energy crisis of the 1970s. By the year 2000 they were on very different policy paths and, as a ...result, the German renewable energy industry has moved well ahead of that in the United States, both in terms of installed capacity in the country and in terms of creating a highly successful export market. In this paper, we reject some of the conventional explanations for this difference. Instead, these differences arise from the intersection of contingent historical events with the distinctive institutional and social structures that affect policy making in each country. Our analysis of the historical path-dependent dynamics of each country suggests that those who wish to further renewable energy policy in the United States need to take into account these institutional and social factors so that they will better be able to exploit the next set of favorable historical circumstances.
•A systematic framework for the optimal design of hybrid energy systems is proposed.•The developed approach is applied to agriculture and irrigation area in Sudan.•Effect of uncertainty parameters on ...system design and cost is examined.•Solar-wind-diesel-battery-converter system is a cost-effective and reliable solution.•Renewable resources and interest rate have high influences on investment decision.
Today, particular attention is being globally paid towards clean and sustainable energy system. The rapid development in renewable energy technologies, growth of energy markets, and adopted financial strategies and policies have the key role in achieving this target. This paper provides a comprehensive feasibility analysis of a gird-isolated hybrid renewable energy system for electrification of agriculture and irrigation area in Dongola, Sudan. A systematic and integrative framework combined with techno-economic optimization analysis for adequate planning and design of hybrid renewable energy system is proposed. Different hybridization cases of a solar photovoltaic, wind turbine, diesel generator, battery storage, and converter technologies, together with a diesel generator-based energy system as base case are modeled, evaluated and compared considering the stochastic behavior of renewable energy resources with a main target to find the most feasible and reliable solution with least system cost and realistic environmental impacts. This followed by a sensitivity analysis to reveal the effects of uncertainty in system parameters on the designed system and its economic performance. The obtained results indicate that solar-wind-diesel-battery-converter hybrid system is of optimal performance and superiority over the studied cases to serve the load demand of the investigated area. The system not only gets the minimum values of the total net present cost (24.16 M$) and levelized cost of energy (0.387 $/kWh), but also effectively achieves a positive return on investment of 39.94% and around 95% reduction in both carbon emissions and fuel consumption compared to the base case. Meanwhile, the result of sensitivity analysis demonstrates the high dependability of system cost on the volatility of solar radiation and wind speed as well as the changes in the rate of interest with the prospect of ignoring the effect of variation of diesel fuel price in the future investment decision. Finally, the output of this study is projected to raising the potentiality awareness of renewable energy in Sudan and providing a valuable reference about the optimal planning and utilization of hybrid renewable energy system in energy sector.
Due to the vast growth of development in the infrastructure and investment in energy, the electricity consumption in the GCC countries had increased at a fast rate; 12.4% from 2005 to 2009 (3.15%, ...annually). This rate is much larger than the world average, which is 2.2% for the same period, or USA (0.5%). In 2005, the average Watt per person in the GCC countries was 1149 which is much higher than the world average (297
W per person) or the European Union (700
W/person) – but less than USA (1460
W/person). The GCC countries need to increase its electrical capacity by 60,000
MW, which represents 80% of the current installed capacity, to meet demand in 2015. This means that there is a need to build 50 more gas fired power generator plant turbine (each rated 1400
MW).
The GCC countries have realized that depending on gas will not be the solution due to shortage of resource or environmental impact, particularly the GHG emissions. Therefore, they thought back of using renewable energy resources – after lifting it over in 1990s. They also thought of diversity in electricity production where nuclear energy comes to the picture. The power capacity in GCC countries is at around 75,000
MW, a projected 9.5% growth in annual demand will require more electricity and energy projects; expected to invest USD 200 billion to 250 billion in between 14 and 20 energy projects by 2020.
The paper lists the major renewable energy projects (mainly solar and wind) in each of the six GCC countries. The total capacity of these projects exceeds 600
MW. Among these projects is the establishment of the first zero emission house (Green house) in the middle east (7
kW solar, wind and fuel cell) constructed in Bapco residence town (Awali) in Bahrain and therefore, been highlighted more in this paper. Moreover, nearly all GCC countries are planning to construct PV plants with large capacity. Also, several projects in Building Integrated Photovoltaic and Building Integrated Wind Turbines are established in GCC countries.
The projects made in the GCC countries allow researchers and investors to size the cost of kWh from thermal, PV and wind energy more precisely. For example, it was found that the cost of kWh from large grid connected solar thermal plant (20
MW) – with cost of USD 72.5 million and energy – is US ¢ 12/kWh (assuming a life time of 40 years and a discount rate of 4%) while, the cost issue of kWh from PV Electricity (in the GCC countries) is ranging from US ¢ 27 (for ground mount) to US ¢ 35 (for roof mount) as it was deduced from two actually installed project PV in UAE – a GCC country member. Meanwhile, the cost of 1
kWh from wind electricity in the GCC countries may be from US ¢10 (large turbine ≈2
MW at 80
m height with good wind speed) to US ¢ 15 (for large turbine ≈2
MW at 80
m height with modest wind speed) while the cost of kWh from grid connected Wind farm plant (20
MW) – with a cost of USD 38.6 million and energy – is US ¢ 6.7/kWh to US ¢ 8.8/kWh, depending on the location of wind farm. This makes it very challengeable for investor, government (Feed-in-Tariff) and citizens because each citizen in GCC countries pays only (US cent 1 for each kWh, for consumption less than 3000
kWh, or even nothing for citizens-like in Qatar).
This work highlights the impact of renewable and non-renewable energy, capital formation, and economic growth on CO2 emissions in the economies that are emerging due to China’s Silk Road Economic ...Belt (SREB) initiative. In this context, data for 24 SREB economies from 1995 to 2014 are analyzed through the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) approach. The results suggest that using a high share of renewable energy to execute economic activities and improve the level of capital formation significantly decreases the rate of CO2 emissions in both the long term and short term in the considered SREB countries. The presence of the Environmental Kuznets Curve and the existence of an inverted U-shaped relationship between economic growth and CO2 emissions are also determined. The negative impact of Gross Capital Formation (GCF) and the negligible effects of trade openness on CO2 discharge are also observed. The negative effect of GCF on carbon emissions suggests either that the SREB economies are investing in low-carbon economic activities or simply that those assets are being produced using cleaner energy sources. It is suggested that these countries should pay more attention to renewable energy resources to improve the environment and maximize the economic benefits of the SREB initiative.
•Renewable energy is a significant source for controlling CO2 emissions in SREB nations.•Improvement in Gross Capital Formation mitigates CO2 emissions in the SREB region.•The findings show that the SREB economies are investing in low-carbon assets.•In SREB countries, CO2 emissions and GDP growth show a bell-shaped relationship.•Trade openness has an insignificant role in controlling CO2 emissions in SREB economies.
Multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) methods are becoming increasingly popular in solving energy selection problems because these problems involve multiple and often conflicting criteria. This paper ...presents comparative analysis of ranking renewable energy sources (RES) for electricity generation in Taiwan using four MCDM methods - WSM, VIKOR, TOPSIS, and ELECTRE. The Shannon entropy weight method is used to assess the importance of each criterion for the ranking of RES. After that, four MCDM methods are utilized for quantitative evaluation to rank all available RE alternatives. From the weights estimation results, efficiency is the first priority in all evaluation criteria, followed by job creation, operation, and maintenance cost. The purpose of this study is to rank the priorities of various RES and propose recommendations for Taiwan's RE development. The ranking results show that hydro is the best alternative in Taiwan, followed by solar, wind, biomass and geothermal. Furthermore, sensitivity analysis of the weights was conducted considering the ranking results heavily depend on the criteria weight. The results of sensitivity analysis indicated that when financial or technical aspects are focused upon, hydropower is the best RES because its technology is the most mature and the cost is the lowest in Taiwan. In addition, from an environmental perspective, wind energy is the best choice, and from the social perspective, solar PV is the best choice. The findings of this study can provide useful information to energy decision makers and serve as a reference for Taiwan's energy policy.
•MCDM methods for ranking renewable energy sources.•Renewable energy policies in Taiwan.•Which Criteria are required for ranking renewable energy sources.
A number of studies in the environment-energy-growth literature aim to pin down the determinants of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions as a result of large increases in CO2 emissions over the last few ...decades. One criticism related to the existing literature is the selection of data. The majority of studies use aggregate energy consumption. The other criticism is the selection of panel estimation techniques. Almost all studies use panel methods that ignore cross-sectional dependence. To fulfill the mentioned gaps in the literature, this empirical study aims to investigate the impacts of renewable and non-renewable energy, real income and trade openness on CO2 emissions in the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) model for the European Union over the period 1980–2012 by employing panel estimation techniques robust to cross-sectional dependence. By using the dynamic ordinary least squares estimator, we show that renewable energy and trade mitigate carbon emissions while non-renewable energy increases CO2 emissions, and the EKC hypothesis is supported. The Dumitrescu-Hurlin non-causality approach indicates that there is bidirectional causality between renewable energy and carbon emissions, and unidirectional causality running from real income to carbon emissions, from CO2 emissions to non-renewable energy, and from trade openness to CO2 emissions.
•The EKC hypothesis is valid for the European Union.•Renewable energy and trade mitigate carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.•Non-renewable energy contributes to CO2 emissions.•There is bidirectional causality between renewable energy and CO2 emissions.•One-way causality runs from real income to CO2 emissions.
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