Improve Energy Quality Research Articles

Household biomass energy choice and its policy implications on improving rural livelihoods in Sichuan, China

It is widely known that a switch from traditional biomass energy to modern clean, safe and efficient energy could improve local rural livelihoods by enhancing the access to ‘high quality’ energy and reducing the negative impacts of traditional biomass energy on health, environment and living standards. Hence, in this paper, we used alternative-specific conditional logit model (ASCLM) to examine the rural household energy choice behaviors in Sichuan Province of China from the perspective of revealed and stated preferences. The results show that the fuel switching in our study region is not a simple unidirectional process from traditional biomass energy to modern fuels as incomes improve. Household energy choice behaviors could be not only affected by energy-specific characteristics such as fuel price, smoky level and safety risk, but also influenced by household-specific factors such as income level, age and educational level of the decision maker, household demographic structure, number of people frequently eating at home, distance to the nearest biomass collecting spot and household location, suggesting that government should attach more importance to simultaneously improve energy quality, control energy price and enhance household socio-economic status.

Multi-Criteria Analysis of Material Compositions of External Walls

Intensity of building development increases by growing population and their requirements on living. Buildings belong to the largest energy consumers and greenhouse gases emitters. Current energy strategy of European Union is focused especially on reduction of operational energy of buildings. Although operational energy participates the highest proportion in total energy consumption over whole life cycle of building, it is important to take into account embodied energy. Values of embodied energy and associated emissions grow by improving energy quality of building envelope by using extra components and insulation materials. This paper demonstrates significance of correct selection of materials in order to environmental and energy optimalization of building structures. The designed material compositions of external wall alternatives are evaluated by methodology LCA and also in the view of impact on future energy consumption though thermal-physical parameters. Results of assessments are compared by multi-criteria decision analysis. The optimized alternative achieves very low embodied energy (218 MJ/m2) and high reduction of embodied CO2 (-114 kg CO2eq/m2).

Three laws of energy transitions

The paper formulates and explores a hypothesis on three general energy transition laws: the law of stable long-term energy costs to income ratio; the law of improving energy quality; and the law of growing energy productivity. These laws are essential for shaping long-term projections and checking for their consistency. All three are rooted in amazingly stable in time and universal across countries energy costs to income ratios. Limited energy purchasing power sets up thresholds, which, if exceeded, bring asymmetry to energy demand to price elasticity. The author believes, that the theoretical postulate on the substantial substitution among production factors, which is used in the production functions theory, may be incorrect. In reality, innovations mainly lead to the substitution of a low-quality production factor with the same yet of a better-quality. Improving energy quality with stable costs to income ratio is accompanied by growing energy productivity. Energy costs to income thresholds are indicators allowing for better projections of oil prices.

Synthesis of Heat Recovery System with Heat Pumps.

Heat recovery systems (HRS) combine heat exchanging and heat pumping to decrease energy demand and improve energy quality, respectively. The synthesis of such a system involves configuring heat exchangers and heat pumps into a network. The problem is more complex than that of conventional heat exchanger synthesis problem, because of a combinatorial nature in properly selecting of heat pump matches (HPMs) and heat matches (HMs). In this work, an evolutionary approach is developed by interactively searching for design variables into total cost effect. The method consists of an initial HRS and neighboring alternatives generation. In the initial generation, a thermodynamic priority is considered to introduce a most preferable configuration of HPMs into the network. In alternative generation, alternative configurations of HPMs are repeatedly introduced to obtain an optimal HPMs as a search variable. An algorithm is proposed to find efficiently the best HRS and its effectiveness is demonstrated through an illustrative example problem.