Available Renewable Energy Research Articles

Impact of incentives for greener battery electric vehicle charging – A field experiment

Battery electric vehicles generate a significant share of their greenhouse gas emissions during production and later, when in use, through the energy used for charging. A shift in charging behavior could substantially reduce emissions if aligned with the fluctuating availability of renewable energy. Financial incentives and environmental appeals have been discussed as potential means to achieve this. We report evidence from a randomized controlled trial in which cost-free and “green” charging was advertised via email notifications to customers of a charging service provider. Emails invited to charge during midday hours (11:00 to 15:00) of days with high predicted shares of renewable energy. Results show a significant increase in the number of charging processes in the critical time, and in the amount of energy charged (kWh), despite only marginal monetary savings of 5€ on average. A further increase in kWh charged was observed on weekends. Under the assumption that these charging processes replaced regular overnight charging at home, this represents reduction in CO2 emissions of over 50%.

Moving toward sustainable environment: The effects of hydropower industry on water quality in EU economies

This research investigates the effect of hydropower yields on water quality in European Union participating nations from 1990 to 2019. Integrating the panel fully modified ordinary least squares, the outcomes show that water quality degradation increase with a rise in hydropower production growth. Similarly, fossil fuel, economic growth and population density are found to be increasing water resource pollution. While institutional quality is found to decrease water quality degradation and water resource pollution. The finding implies that water quality degradation in the EU27 region can be effectively increased by increasing the amount of hydropower production in sustainability procedures. This will increasingly influence the status of climate change. The evaluated outcomes are observed to be valid as they were authenticated with the panel dynamic ordinary least square and pooled ordinary least square. Therefore, it attests to the paper's uniqueness, input to the body of knowledge and novelty. The research suggests that for EU27 nations have to enhance the role of the hydropower industry in their energy mix to achieve Energy Union objectives taking into consideration the water resources pollution factor. Authorities in these nations must also focus more on investing in the growth of the hydropower industry to add more to its production and availability of renewable energy and decrease water quality degradation. The government of these nations can similarly stress the competence and sustainability of hydropower production and water resource conservation to reach energy security and reduce water quality degradation.

An effect of green energy utilization on Industrial development in India

India is a developing country, with a population of about 1,387,297,452. India requires a lot of energy both for development and running all its systems smoothly. Most of the energy consumed in India is in electrical form. The electrical energy consumption of India is around 1,137.00 billion kWh of electric energy per year. When counted per person, this energy comes to an average of around 841 kWh. When looking at the tactical data given out by the Indian government, 80% of the total electrical energy is produced using fossil fuels, even though there is a lot of abundant availability of renewable energy here in India. This paper studies the various renewable energy sources currently utilized in various sectors in India. This paper looks at the effect of technical efficiency gains on energy use in industrial, agricultural, and other sectors in India, at varying levels of aggregation. This paper gives the present status of energy sources and utilization areas. Although around 80% of the average temperature zone is available in the Indian subcontinent, the electrical energy produced in India via solar energy is less than around 1.3% of total consumption. India currently produces 63.730 GW, which is very less when compared to the total energy required. Similarly, India produces 32 GW of electrical energy from the wind sector, which is very little compared to the total energy consumption.

Online delay-guaranteed workload scheduling to minimize power cost in cloud data centers using renewable energy

More and more cloud data centers are turning to leverage on-site renewable energy to reduce power cost for sustainable development. But how to effectively coordinate the intermittent renewable energy with workload remains to be a great challenge. This paper investigates the problem of workload scheduling for power cost minimization under the constraints of different Service Level Agreements (SLAs) of delay tolerant workload and delay sensitive workload for green data centers in a smart grid. Different from the existing studies, we take into consideration of the impact of zero price in the smart grid and the cost of on-site renewable energy. To handle the randomness of workload, electricity price and renewable energy availability, we first formulate the problem as a constrained stochastic problem. Then we propose an efficient online control algorithm named ODGWS (Online Delay-Guaranteed Workload Scheduling) which makes online scheduling decisions achieve a bounded guarantee from the worst scheduling delay for delay tolerant workload. Compared with the existing solutions, our ODGWS decomposes the problem into that of solving a simple optimization problem within each time slot in O(1) time without needing any future information. The rigorous theoretical analysis demonstrates that our algorithm achieves a [O(1V),O(V)] cost-delay tradeoff, where V is a balance parameter between the cost optimality and service quality. Extensive simulations based on real-world traces are done to evaluate the performance of our algorithm. The results show that ODGWS saves about 5% average power cost compared with the baseline algorithms.

Opportunities and Challenges of Renewable Energy Production in Ethiopia

Ethiopia is one of the fastest-growing economies in the world despite immense challenges towards access to sustainable energy supplies and modern energy technologies. The country is undertaking great effort towards the development of renewable energy technologies and green legacy. However, the largest share of energy consumption (≈87%) in Ethiopia is dominated by traditional fuels (charcoal, fuel wood, dung cakes, and agricultural residues) which pose various health and environmental risks. The country has an enormous amount of renewable energy potentials (e.g., solar, hydro, wind and geothermal), but only 5% of its full hydropower potential is exploited and others are not fully harvested or not well developed to date. This review paper provides a comprehensive assessment on renewable energy availability, potential, opportunity, and challenges in Ethiopia. We believe the information provided in this review will enlighten the current and future prospects of renewable energy deployment in Ethiopia.

Dynamic sale prices for load serving entity's risk based profit maximization

In any retail market, Load Serving Entities (LSE) and consumers can benefit from an effective dynamic pricing mechanism. Consumer's price responsiveness and uncertainty of Wholesale Electricity Market (WEM) prices can offer unexpected profits for LSE. LSEs are incentivised to procure a portion of their energy demand from Energy Storage Systems (ESS) due to increasing renewable penetration at the distribution end. LSE's decisions become complex while handling uncertainty arising from such constantly varying conditions. Sale price dynamics optimization could minimize undesirable impact of these uncertainties and maximize LSE's profit. However, this optimization is subject to severe WEM price uncertainty. In this perspective, this paper proposes a sale price dynamics optimization model to maximize LSE's profit while immunizing LSE against severe uncertainty of WEM prices. Information Gap Decision Theory (IGDT) framework is considered to explicitly model severe price uncertainty and determine robust and opportunistic decisions. Impact of Renewable Energy (RE) availability along with Battery Energy Storage (BES) operations on procurement decisions is analyzed. Results highlight that the proposed model ensures consumer benefit and increases LSE's profit. Correlation variation between demand and WEM price profile establishes effectiveness of the proposed model. RE and BES enhance robustness of procurement decisions.

Co-optimization of multi-energy system operation, district heating/cooling network and thermal comfort management for buildings

The ongoing decarbonization of the energy sector spurs the employment of distributed generation and efficient load control approaches (demand side management). This work tackles the optimal operation of a Multi Energy System and thermal comfort management for buildings with an integrated approach. The dynamic thermal energy balance of the buildings is included in the Mixed Integer Linear Programming scheduling problem to exploit the heat capacity of buildings and increase the operational flexibility of the generators. The method is firstly applied to a single building served by different energy systems, comprising renewable energy sources, cogeneration units and heat pumps. Then, the methodology is further extended by integrating in the formulation the model of the district heating/cooling network. This method is tested in a group of 12 buildings of the Campus of University of Parma, featuring different thermal properties. By enabling a variation within ± 2 °C around the indoor temperature setpoint and by optimizing water delivery temperature, it is possible to achieve savings on operating costs over the baseline up to 80%. Results show that the load shift capability of buildings plays a major role when thermal demand mismatches renewable energy availability or low electricity price periods. Moreover, district heating network can be exploited as an additional short-term heat storage by varying water delivery temperature profile.

Gender and renewable energy integration: The mediating role of green-microfinance

Women empowerment is counted as the fifth sustainable development goal known as gender equality (SDG 5), and it is affected by many factors. In East Sumba, renewable energy development as the seventh sustainable development goal (SDG 7: Affordable and clean energy) provides opportunities and challenges in empowering women. Rural microfinance institutions (MFIs) enable women to increase their empowerment by managing energy. This paper explores the direct and indirect (mediated) effect of renewable energy on women's empowerment via green MFIs. We employed Partial Least Squares-Structural Equation Model (PLS-SEM) with bootstrapping technique and Sobel test to perform the mediating effect. The findings showed the direct relationship of renewable energy on green MFIs and provided empirical evidence on the mediating effect of green MFIs. It confirms green MFIs sustainably, which operates based on the integration model of gender mainstreaming in the renewable energy sector. The results imply that the pro gender policy of local government in response to the availability of renewable energy supported by developing green MFIs.

The Opportunities and Constraints of Wind Energy

One of the most dominant energy sources is the fossil energy. However, fossil energy based power plant is one of the primary contributors of greenhouse gas which is the main cause of global warming. Besides that, the supply of fossil energy keeps on depleting along the year. Because of that, the availability of New and Renewable Energy (NRE) sources to overcome these problems are vital. Up until this moment, several types of NRE such as water energy, geothermal, and bioenergy have been utilized. However, the utilization capacity is pretty low and needs to be enhanced, either by optimizing the existing NRE or by exploring other type of non-fossil energy source as alternative NREs. One of the non fossil energy sources that have the potential is the wind energy. Indonesia has many areas that have the potential for developing PLTB because they have an average annual wind speed of 3.4-4.5 seconds or have an energy between 200 kWh/m to 1000 kWh/m. In operation, the exhaust emissions produced by wind power plants in the form of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and atmospheric pollutants are less when compared to power plants using fossil fuels. In addition, carbon dioxide emissions from wind power plants are only one hundredth of that of fossil fuels. Thus, it can be said that the development of electricity with wind power has good prospects to be applied in several regions in Indonesia.

Emitting less without curbing usage? Exploring greenhouse gas mitigation strategies in the water industry through load shifting

Growing interest in greenhouse gas mitigation strategies to address global climate change has resulted in the rapid expansion of renewable electricity sources. However, increasing power generation from variable renewable electricity sources, such as solar photovoltaics and wind turbines, has made balancing electricity supply and demand across the power grid more challenging. In some regions, high penetrations of variable renewables have also created electricity supply systems where electricity is significantly cleaner in hours when renewable energy is abundant, in comparison with peak demand hours when fossil fuel-based generation is often dominant. In the absence of cost-effective, utility-scale batteries, demand response strategies that leverage flexibility in electricity consumption have gained interest as readily available resources to address the temporal mismatch between renewable energy availability and high energy demand periods. The water industry (i.e., water supply and wastewater systems) includes industrial customers that are particularly attractive in terms of demand response potential as they can offer flexibility through large interruptible pumping loads, large water storage capacities, and energy generation potential. This study explores flexibility strategies in the water sector motivated primarily by the goal of reducing emissions, rather than cost. We present an illustrative case study demonstrating that strategically shifting 5% of the total daily average electricity load of a cluster of 97 water-supply electricity consumers in California across the year can reduce annual carbon dioxide emissions by 2–5%. In the end, important future research directions are discussed to support the implementation of flexibility measures in the water industry.

Renewable Energy Sources In Rajasthan For Sustainable Development

Globally, energy consumption is increasing drastically due to the economic growth, rapid industrialization and increasing domestic comforts. Also energy is now considered to be important criteria for sustainable development of any country. Melting of ice caps, overabundance of greenhouse gases, global warming and other drastic climatic changes worldwide, has turned attention towards environmental issues. Exploiting the enormous potential of renewable energy sources could be one of the alternatives of total dependency on the conventional energy resources. In India, the population is sparsely scattered in vast geographic location, because of which the government often cannot provide electric power to the entire citizen through the centralized national grid. In that case, renewable energy is a good option to as it can be used as a stand-alone distributed generation system. In this paper, the availability and current status of renewable energy in Rajasthan is summarized. This summary of available resources helps researchers, investors and developers to find probability of improvement in technologies to harness renewable energy and to map out further expansion of renewable energy generation.

Application and performance analysis of 100% renewable energy systems serving low-density communities

Distributed energy systems are becoming increasingly popular worldwide. The 100% renewable energy system can be an important energy supply alternative to reduce the carbon emissions and address energy shortage, especially for remote areas. However, the performance of 100% renewable energy system (RES) at community level needs further detailed analysis, which is affected by the climates, availability of renewable energy and local energy markets. This paper proposes a design optimization framework of 100% renewable energy systems for low-density communities and investigates the system performance. To investigate the integration and performance of 100% RES, thirty typical cities located in different regions of China were chosen considering different climates, geographical features, and renewable energy distributions. By taking the economic performance as the optimization objective, the optimal design for the 100% RES is obtained, and the energy and economic performance is analyzed. Results show that, under the current energy market conditions, the 100% RES is feasible for low-density communities in most regions of China. The payback periods of the systems in most cities are less than six years. When the cost of PV is reduced by half considering future technological developments, the payback period of a 100% RES can be reduced by 30%–60%. This paper would provide design suggestions and application recommendations in regard to promoting 100% RES in China.

Electrification of Highway Transportation with Solar and Wind Energy

Global warming has triggered waves of public awareness to surface very strongly worldwide, urging to eliminate all greenhouse gas emissions in a timely fashion. Among all feasible approaches to achieving this goal, using renewables to replace fossil fuels and electric vehicles (EVs) to replace conventional internal combustion engine vehicles is arguably a top-priority task. However, there is a severe lack of practical approaches to measuring a proper renewable mix for powering EVs in a large highway network while also considering renewables’ seasonal availability and the possible need to regulate the production and consumption of renewable energy with grid-scale battery arrays installed at certain locations. This urgent need motivates developing the mixed-integer programming model as presented in this paper. Furthermore, a comprehensive case study on Taiwan’s national highways covers such useful knowledge as the process to prepare key numeric data, especially local solar and wind energy and highway traffic, in-depth analysis on model solutions to reveal the overall availability of renewable energy across the highway network, and close measurements on the required investments. These findings support using renewable energy to power EVs on a national highway and reveal the importance of local business involvements. However, a relatively small country, such as Taiwan, can still display significant variations in renewable power availability. In a stand-alone setting for power usage, these variations would result in massive volumes of renewable energy not used by highway travel in some seasons. These details demonstrate the applicability and values of the proposed model in a real situation.

Energi Terbarukan dan Ekonomi Syariah: Sinergitas Mewujudkan Sustainable Development

The urgency of the availability of renewable energy, green economy and implementation of Sharia Economy actually has a spirit that is in line with the efforts of the global community in supporting sustainable development. The synergy between Sharia Economy practices in Indonesia and renewable energy programs in order to realize it becomes an inevitability. This research aims to describe the concept of synergy of Sharia Economy practices and renewable energy programs in Indonesia in order to realize sustainable development. This research is qualitative descriptive research through library study methods and content analysis. The results showed that the synergy scheme between renewable energy programs and Islamic economic/financial practices can be done in the form of: (i) sharia financial sector can be an instrument of EBT investment financing; (ii) the utilization of EBT may be a supporter and spearhead of halal industry, such as halal food and beverages, Muslim fashion, halal tourism, pharmaceuticals and halal cosmetics and halal media and recreation; and (iii) in the context of socially religious EBT financing, EBT can be done with the concept of ta'āwun and sedekaj jariah through crowd funding and waqf. In order to optimize the synergy between renewable energy programs and sharia economy, some steps and Quick Wins programs that can be done are: (1) campaigns against the excellence of renewable energy to achieve national energy self-sufficiency; (2) create easy access and attractive financing schemes to support renewable energy; (3) conduct research and publication on renewable energy and potential collaboration with other industries in the halal value chain that can be perceived in Indonesia, especially halal tourism.Keywords: renewable, energy, Islamic, economic, sustainable AbstrakUrgensi ketersediaan energi terbarukan, green economy dan implementasi Ekonomi Syariah sesungguhnya memiliki ruh yang sejalan dengan upaya masyarakat global dalam mendukung pembangunan berkelanjutan. Sinergitas antara praktik Ekonomi Syariah di Indonesia dan program energi terbarukan dalam rangka mewujudkannya menjadi sebuah keniscayaan. Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mendeskripsikan konsep sinergitas praktik Ekonomi Syariah dan program energi terbarukan di Indonesia dalam rangka mewujudkan pembangunan yang berkelanjutan (sustainable development). Penelitian ini merupakan penelitian deskriptif kualitatif melalui metode studi pustaka dan content analysis. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa skema sinergitas di antara program energi terbarukan dan praktik ekonomi/keuangan Syariah dapat dilakukan dalam bentuk: (i) sektor keuangan Syariah dapat menjadi instrumen pembiayaan investasi EBT; (ii) pemanfaatan EBT dapat menjadi pendukung dan ujung tombak industri halal, seperti makanan dan minuman halal, fesyen muslim, pariwisata halal, farmasi dan kosmetik halal dan media dan rekreasi halal; dan (iii) dalam konteks pembiayaan EBT yang bersifat sosial keagamaan, EBT dapat dilakukan dengan konsep ta’āwun dan sedekah jariah melalui urun dana (crowd funding) dan wakaf. Dalam rangka mengoptimalkan sinergitas antara program energi terbarukan dan ekonomi Syariah, beberapa langkah dan program Quick Wins yang dapat dilakukan adalah: (1) kampanye terhadap keunggulan energi terbarukan untuk mencapai swasembada energi nasional; (2) menciptakan kemudahan akses dan skema pembiayaan yang menarik untuk mendukung energi terbarukan; (3) mengadakan riset dan publikasi mengenai energi terbarukan dan potensi kolaborasi dengan industri lain dalam rantai nilai halal yang dapat diaplikasikan di Indonesia, terutama pariwisata halal. Kata kunci: terbarukan, energi, Islam, ekonomi, sustainable

Water-energy nexus in African power pools – The Dispa-SET Africa model

The operation and economic profitability of modern energy systems is constrained by the availability of renewable energy and water resources. Lower water availability due to climate change, higher demand and increased water consumption for non-energy and energy needs may cause problems in Africa. In most African power systems, hydropower is a dominant renewable energy resource, and interconnection capacities are usually limited or unreliable. This paper describes a new modelling framework for analysing the water-energy nexus in the African Power Pools. This framework includes soft linking between two models: the LISFLOOD model is used to generate hydrological inputs and the Dispa-SET model is used for mid-term hydrothermal coordination and optimal unit commitment and power dispatch over the whole African continent. The results show a good agreement between the model outputs and the historical values, despite data-related limitations. Furthermore, the simulations provide hourly time series of electricity generation at the plant level in a robust way. It appears that some African power pools heavily rely on the availability of freshwater resources, while others are less dependent. In the long term, the dependence of the power system on water resources is likely to increase to meet the increasing electricity demand in Africa.

Reducing energy costs and CO2 emissions by production system energy flexibility through the integration of renewable energy

In recent years, the production of renewable energy has increased continuously to reduce fossil fuel consumption and CO2 emissions and to increase energy efficiency. The challenge of industries is to integrate renewable energy systems into the existing power system of manufacturing industries. In the energy flexibility approach, the manufacturing energy demand is aligned with renewable energy availability, to improve the use of the renewable energy source. This paper aims to investigate a manufacturing system supplied by a photovoltaic plant coupled with a battery storage system. A basic storage model has been developed and implemented to pursue this issue. The model is applied in the simplified case of a manufacturing system composed of a cutting numerical control machine, which can adapt the cutting speed to align the power needed to the power supplied by the photovoltaic plant. However, the model can be extended to realistic production cases characterized by complex systems as long as the time evolution of energy consumptions are known in detail. The introduction of battery storage allows reducing the cutting speed fluctuations, improving the cutting life derived from the fatigue effect. This solution reduces the costs of the machine and improves the forecasting of the means needed for the manufacturing system. Finally, a detailed analysis of greenhouse gas reduction is discussed.

An Analysis of the Application of Energy Storage Technology in Power Systems

With the rapid development of China’s economy, the coverage area of China’s power grid is expanding, and users have higher requirements for the quality and reliability of electrical energy. And the development of energy storage technology has improved the stability of power system operation, voltage and frequency regulation, load compensation, and also injected new development ideas into the planning and design of power systems, manufacturing control, etc. Energy storage technology occupies a very important position in the power system, the needs of its power system so as to enhance the availability of renewable energy and ensure that the power system can operate safely and stably. This paper provides further analysis and discussion on the application of energy storage technology in power systems.

Production Line Optimization to Minimize Energy Cost and Participate in Demand Response Events

The scheduling of tasks in a production line is a complex problem that needs to take into account several constraints, such as product deadlines and machine limitations. With innovative focus, the main constraint that will be addressed in this paper, and that usually is not considered, is the energy consumption cost in the production line. For that, an approach based on genetic algorithms is proposed and implemented. The use of local energy generation, especially from renewable sources, and the possibility of having multiple energy providers allow the user to manage its consumption according to energy prices and energy availability. The proposed solution takes into account the energy availability of renewable sources and energy prices to optimize the scheduling of a production line using a genetic algorithm with multiple constraints. The proposed algorithm also enables a production line to participate in demand response events by shifting its production, by using the flexibility of production lines. A case study using real production data that represents a textile industry is presented, where the tasks for six days are scheduled. During the week, a demand response event is launched, and the proposed algorithm shifts the consumption by changing task orders and machine usage.

Investigation of availability, demand, targets, and development of renewable energy in 2017\u20132050: a case study in Indonesia

Abundant potential of renewable energy (RE) in Indonesia is predicted to replace conventional energy which continues to experience depletion year by year. However, until now, the use of RE has only reached 2% of the existing potential of 441.7 GW. The main overview of this work is to investigate the availability of RE that can be utilized for electricity generation in Indonesia. National energy demand and targets in the long run during the 2017–2050 period are also discussed. Besides, government policies in supporting RE development are considered in this work. The results show that the potential of RE in Indonesia can be utilized and might replace conventional energy for decades. The use of RE for electricity generation can be achieved by employing a government policy that supports the investor as the executor of RE development. The selling price of electricity generated from RE is cheaper than electricity generated from fossils; this makes economy is more affordable for people. Finally, the target set by the government for utilizing RE as the main energy in Indonesia can be done by implementing several policies for the RE development. Thus, greenhouse gas emissions and the use of petroleum fuels can be reduced.

IoT-Enabled Proposal for Adaptive Self-Powered Renewable Energy Management in Home Systems

The new generation of communication networks can provide massive connectivity of devices, extremely low latency, higher capacity, and increased bandwidth. These features enable the deployment of management systems in different sectors such as energy and in a wide variety of environments such as agriculture, surveillance or home systems. In this regard, this paper proposes a self-powered adaptive and automated home energy control system enabled by the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies. The system aims to adapt the consumption patterns to the availability of self-generated renewable energy (produced from solar panels, wind-mills, etc.). Therefore, the renewable and non-renewable supply from the power grid is considered a secondary power source. As part of the proposal, this paper presents the consumption negotiation scheme for IoT devices, the management mechanisms to optimize the use of the available energy, and the related model. Given the complexity of the adaptive management process, the proposal also presents a heuristic strategy based on a prepartitioning method to obtain feasible solutions in a reasonable running time. The simulation results for offline and online scenarios validate the advantages of the proposed strategy, and the numerical improvements are presented.