This Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Special Report (IPCC-SRREN) assesses the potential role of renewable energy in the mitigation of climate change. It covers the six most important ...renewable energy sources – bioenergy, solar, geothermal, hydropower, ocean and wind energy – as well as their integration into present and future energy systems. It considers the environmental and social consequences associated with the deployment of these technologies and presents strategies to overcome technical as well as non-technical obstacles to their application and diffusion. SRREN brings a broad spectrum of technology-specific experts together with scientists studying energy systems as a whole. Prepared following strict IPCC procedures, it presents an impartial assessment of the current state of knowledge: it is policy relevant but not policy prescriptive. SRREN is an invaluable assessment of the potential role of renewable energy for the mitigation of climate change for policymakers, the private sector and academic researchers.
Between 2009 and 2013 Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer conducted fieldwork in Mexico's Isthmus of Tehuantepec to examine the political, social, and ecological dimensions of moving from fossil fuels to ...wind power. Their work manifested itself as a new ethnographic form: the duograph—a combination of two single-authored books that draw on shared fieldsites, archives, and encounters that can be productively read together, yet can also stand alone in their analytic ambitions.In her volume, Ecologics, Howe narrates how an antidote to the Anthropocene became both failure and success. Tracking the development of what would have been Latin America's largest wind park, Howe documents indigenous people's resistance to the project and the political and corporate climate that derailed its renewable energy potential. Using feminist and more-than-human theories, Howe demonstrates how the dynamics of energy and environment cannot be captured without understanding how human aspirations for energy articulate with nonhuman beings, technomaterial objects, and the geophysical forces that are at the heart of wind and power.
Grid Parity provides an in-depth examination of the knowledge, insights, and techniques that are essential to success in financing renewable energy projects. An energy project finance expert with 35 ...years of experience in capital asset financing, the author provides a comprehensive overview of how to finance renewable energy projects in America today. He explores all components of "the deal" including tax, accounting, legal, regulatory, documentation, asset management and legislative drivers to this dynamic growth sector. Filled with case studies, the book provides a thorough examination of what it takes to compete in the green-energy marketplace.
The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is one of the most water-stressed parts of the world. In just over 25 years, between 1975 and 2001. Looking to the future, MENA's freshwater outlook is ...expected to worsen because of continued population growth and projected climate change impacts. The region's population is on the way to doubling to 700 million by 2050. Projections of climate change and variability impacts on the region's water availability are highly uncertain, but they are expected to be largely negative. To offer just one more example, rainfall and freshwater availability could decrease by up to 40 percent for some MENA countries by the end of this century. The urgent challenge is how to adapt to the future as illustrated by these numbers and how to turn the region's economy onto a sustainable path. This volume suggests new ways of thinking about the complex changes and planning needed to achieve this. New thinking will mean making better use of desert land, sun, and salt water the abundant riches of the region which can be harnessed to underpin sustainable growth. More mundane, but just as important, new thinking will also mean planning for dramatically better management of the water already available. Right now, water is very poorly managed in MENA. Inefficiencies are notorious in agriculture, where irrigation consumes up to 81 percent of extracted water. Similarly, municipal and industrial water supply systems have abnormally high losses, and most utilities are financially unsustainable. In addition, many MENA countries overexploit their fossil aquifers to meet growing water demand. None of this is sustainable while water resources decline. This volume hopes to add to the ongoing thinking and planning by presenting methodologies to address the water demand gap. It assesses the viability of desalination powered by renewable energy from economic, social, technical, and environmental viewpoints, and it reviews initiatives attempting to make renewable energy desalination a competitively viable option. The authors also highlight the change required in terms of policy, financing, and regional cooperation to make this alternative method of desalination a success. And as with any leading edge technology, the conversation here is of course about scale, cost, environmental impact, and where countries share water bodies plain good neighborly behavior.
The increasing installation of renewable energy sources (RESs) has led to a growing energy storage demand in the grid. The high cost of batteries and the potential environmental impact of used ...batteries cannot be ignored. Electric spring (ES), as a demand-side management technique, can effectively reduce the energy storage demand by utilizing the allowable power fluctuation range of noncritical load (NCL). Among the existing ESs, the second version ES (ES-2) can compensate both active and reactive power and has received the most attention. However, the existing research articles on ES-2 basically do not consider the power limitation of the NCL, which may result in the NCL voltage exceeding the allowable range and the insufficient reduction of the energy storage demand. To solve this problem, a load voltage angle control strategy for ES-2 is proposed in this article. This control strategy ensures the power fluctuation of NCL within the allowable range by controlling the angle between the critical load voltage and the NCL voltage in real time. Meanwhile, the allowable power fluctuation range of NCL is fully utilized to minimize the battery capacity. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy is verified by simulation and experiment.
This book addresses the rapidly changing citizen roles in innovation, technology adoption, intermediation, market creation, and legitimacy building for low-carbon solutions. It links research in ...innovation studies, sustainability transitions, and science and technology studies, and builds a new approach for the study of user contributions to innovation and sociotechnical change. Citizen Activities in Energy Transition gives detailed and empirically grounded overall appraisal of citizens’ active technological engagement in the current energy transition, in an era when Internet connectivity has given rise to important new forms of citizen communities and interactions. It elaborates a new way to study users in sociotechnical change through long-term ethnographic and historical research and reports its deployment in a major, decade-long line of investigation on user activities in small-scale renewables, addressing user contributions from the early years to the late proliferation stages of small-scale renewable energy technologies (S-RETs). It offers a much-needed empirical and theoretical understanding of the dynamics of the activities in which users are engaged over the course of sociotechnical change, including innovation, adoption, adjustment, intermediation, community building, digital communities, market creation, and legitimacy creation. This work is a must-read for those seeking to understand the role of users in innovation, energy systems change and the significance of new digital communities in present and future sociotechnical change. Academics, policymakers, and managers are given a new resource to understand the "demand side" of sociotechnical change beyond the patterns of investment, adoption, and social acceptance that have traditionally occupied their attention.
The implementation of renewable energy sources (RES) in isolated power systems, as is the case of islands, constitutes both a challenge and an opportunity. The intermittency of some RES, namely wind ...and solar, originates problems of grid stability and a mismatch between power demand and supply. The interconnection between isolated power systems can decrease the RES variability and, thereby, minimize the problems associated with their intermittency. In this work, the endogenous resources of the islands of Pico and Faial, in Azores, were characterized and their power systems modelled. A scenario considering the interconnection between the power systems of the two islands is proposed with the objective of increasing the share of RES power in the total power production. The scenario was modelled using EnergyPLAN and the results show that RES penetration can increase 50 percentage points by 2030 in relation to the current situation. The implementation of this scenario requires additional annual costs of about 1.29 M€. Additionally, based on the knowledge gained from this study, measures that may lead, in the long run, to the complete elimination of the overall use of fossil fuels in both islands are presented and discussed.
•Interconnection between isolated power systems can decrease RES variability and intermittency.•RES potential of Pico and Faial islands were characterized and their power systems modelled.•Interconnection of the power systems of these islands increase RES penetration by 50 pp.•This interconnection leads to additional annual costs of 1.29 M€.•Measures that lead, in the long run, to complete elimination of fossil fuels in the islands are discussed.
In recent researches on inverter-based distributed generators, disadvantages of traditional grid-connected current control, such as no grid-forming ability and lack of inertia, have been pointed out. ...As a result, novel control methods like droop control and virtual synchronous generator (VSG) have been proposed. In both methods, droop characteristics are used to control active and reactive power, and the only difference between them is that VSG has virtual inertia with the emulation of swing equation, whereas droop control has no inertia. In this paper, dynamic characteristics of both control methods are studied, in both stand-alone mode and synchronous-generator-connected mode, to understand the differences caused by swing equation. Small-signal models are built to compare transient responses of frequency during a small loading transition, and state-space models are built to analyze oscillation of output active power. Effects of delays in both controls are also studied, and an inertial droop control method is proposed based on the comparison. The results are verified by simulations and experiments. It is suggested that VSG control and proposed inertial droop control inherits the advantages of droop control, and in addition, provides inertia support for the system.
Despite decades of effort and billions of dollars spent, two thirds of people in sub-Saharan Africa still lack access to electricity, a vital pre-cursor to economic development and poverty reduction. ...Ambitious international policy commitments seek to address this, but scholarship has failed to keep pace with policy ambitions, lacking both the empirical basis and the theoretical perspective to inform such transformative policy aims. Sustainable Energy for All aims to fill this gap. Through detailed historical analysis of the Kenyan solar PV market the book demonstrates the value of a new theoretical perspective based on Socio-Technical Innovation System Building. Importantly, the book goes beyond a purely academic critique to detail exactly how a Socio-Technical Innovation System Building approach might be operationalized in practice, facilitating both a detailed plan for future comparative research as well as a clear agenda for policy and practice.
Between 2009 and 2013 Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer conducted fieldwork in Mexico's Isthmus of Tehuantepec to examine the political, social, and ecological dimensions of moving from fossil fuels to ...wind power. Their work manifested itself as a new ethnographic form: the duograph—a combination of two single-authored books that draw on shared fieldsites, archives, and encounters that can be productively read together, yet can also stand alone in their analytic ambitions.In his volume, Energopolitics, Boyer examines the politics of wind power and how it is shaped by myriad factors, from the legacies of settler colonialism and indigenous resistance to state bureaucracy and corporate investment. Drawing on interviews with activists, campesinos, engineers, bureaucrats, politicians, and bankers, Boyer outlines the fundamental impact of energy and fuel on political power. Boyer also demonstrates how large conceptual frameworks cannot adequately explain the fraught and uniquely complicated conditions on the isthmus, illustrating the need to resist narratives of anthropocenic universalism and to attend to local particularities.
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