Renewable Consumption Research Articles

Non-linear threshold effect of financial development on renewable energy consumption: evidence from panel smooth transition regression approach.

Financial development is identified as one of the significant factors that affect energy consumption and has been widely discussed in the literature. However, the association between financial development and renewable energy consumption is still at its earlier stage and is limitedly explored. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to examine the non-linear association between financial development and renewable energy consumption in the top renewable energy consumption countries. The study utilized the newly introduced econometric technique panel smooth transition regression (PSTR) model with two regimes on annual panel data consisted of years 1997-2017. The result confirmed that all the financial development indicators increase renewable energy consumption but affect renewable energy consumption differently. Moreover, the economic growth and industrial structure showed a positive and significant association in both regimes, whereas the population showed a negative relationship with renewable energy consumption in a low growth regime but the association becomes positive in high growth regimes. The study suggested several policies for the top renewable consumption countries.

Cooperative Demand Response Framework for a Smart Community Targeting Renewables: Testbed Implementation and Performance Evaluation

Demand response (DR) is emerging as the workhorse of achieving energy efficiency and reducing our carbon footprint, which persists as a major challenge amongst all the different energy-chain players, i.e., the utility providers, policy makers, consumers, and the technology sector. For instance, the Internet-of-Things (IoT) paradigm and network-enabled appliances/devices have escalated the expectations of what technology could do for the acceptance of DR programs. In this work, we design, deploy on a scalable pilot testbed, and evaluate a collaboration-based approach to the demand-side management of a community of electricity consumers that jointly targets green consumption. The design of the framework architecture is centralized via the so-called aggregator, which optimizes the demand scheduled by consumers along with their time frame preferences towards the maximization of the consumption of renewables. On the pilot, we opt for lightweight, yet efficient platforms such as Raspberry Pi boards, and evaluate them over a series of network protocols, i.e., MQTT-TLS and CoAP-DTLS, paying special attention to the security and privacy of the communications over Z-Wave, ZigBee, and WiFi. The experiments conducted are configured using two active Living Labs datasets from which we extract three community scenarios that vary according to the flexibility or rigidity of the appliances’ operation time frame demand. During the performance evaluation, processing and communication overheads lie within feasible ranges, i.e., the aggregator requires less than 2 s to schedule a small consumer community with four appliances, whereas the latency of its link to households’ controllers adds less than 100 ms. In addition, we demonstrate that our implementations running over WiFi links and UDP sockets on Raspberry Pi 4 boards are fast, though insecure. By contrast, secure CoAP (with DTLS) offers data encryption, automatic key management, and integrity protection, as well as authentication with acceptable overheads.

Inequalities by energy sources: An assessment of environmental quality.

Energy demand is rising day by day, driven mainly by the development of countries. At the same time, uneven economic growth in countries is the prime cause of inequality in energy consumption. Keeping in view the worth of energy in the growth process, this study quantifies the impact of energy inequalities and trade on environmental quality over the period 1995–2018 for 57 countries. The Theil approach is used to quantify inter-and intra-regional disparities in five energy sources; oil, coal, natural gas hydroelectricity, and renewable energy. The results show that North America has the highest oil consumption inequality between the regions while East Asia & Pacific has the highest index value within the regions. Coal consumption inequality is declining in North America, but not in East Asia and the Pacific. Europe & Central Asia, and North America have the highest inequalities in natural gas consumption between the regions. Inequality is shrinking in hydropower consumption between the regions, however, such trend has not loomed within the regions. Europe & Central Asia and East Asia & Pacific have major renewable consumption inequalities within the regions. Generally, there is a decreasing temporal trend in energy consumption inequalities of all energy sources. The GMM technique is applied to investigate the impact of energy inequalities and trade openness on environmental quality. The results reveal that energy inequalities degrade environmental quality. Moreover, trade has a positive impact on environmental quality. However, democratic countries can be advantageous to improve the environmental quality. The study implies that countries should take actions to reduce energy inequalities within and between the regions. Specialization in production through trade can also be an option for improvement in the environment.

Coordination planning of wind farm, energy storage and transmission network with high-penetration renewable energy

With larger scale renewable energy integrated, high-penetration renewable energy is deemed as one of the most important characteristics in the future power system. However, the inevitable uncertainty of both source and demand has brought significant challenges to planners. Since discoordination planning schemes restrict the optimal operation, a novel and efficient co-planning methodology is urgent to be investigated. Thus, we propose an innovative co-planning model of wind farm, energy storage and transmission network, which successfully takes imbalanced power, unit ramp capacity and incentive mechanism for renewable energy into consideration. To facilitate the renewable consumption, flexible implementations comprising optimal transmission switching (OTS) and unit commitment (UC) are integrated to further optimize the network topology and achieve flexible startup/shutdown of conventional unit. Furthermore, a linear tie-line model designed for multi-regional planning problems has been constructed to capture the presumed limitations. Afterwards, a decentralized decomposition algorithm based on analytical target cascading (ATC) is modified to deal with the proposed model through a completely parallel mode. The modified IEEE 48-bus test system demonstrates the priority of our proposed co-planning model and the corresponding solution algorithm.

The role of innovation in reducing South Korea's energy intensity: Regional-data evidence on various energy carriers

We analyze the growth-energy use nexus for South Korea, considering province-level consumption data for both total energy use and the five main energy carriers from 2002 to 2017. Given the importance in the country's environmental initiatives and lack of Korea-specific empirical evidence, our focus lies on the role of technological change in reducing the corresponding energy intensities and related changes induced by the National Strategy for Green Growth launched in 2009. While we decompose the growth effect into technique and composition effects and treat income as endogenous, three additional indicators are used to measure innovation activity. We find that not only the income-induced technique effect, but also trade openness, government environmental expenditures, and in part innovation, reduce the total energy intensity. Interestingly, the effects of innovation and government expenditures have been significantly stronger since 2009, whereas the total energy intensity has not improved during the same period. At the energy carrier level, the importance of the drivers is heterogeneous. The technique effect reduces the oil and electricity consumption intensity in particular, and increases the renewables consumption intensity. Reductions in the coal consumption intensity are driven by increases in government expenditures, innovation activity, and trade openness. Decreasing the natural gas consumption intensity appears difficult to achieve.

Australian chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) emissions: 1960–2017

Environmental contextChlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) are potent greenhouse and stratospheric ozone depleting trace gases. Their atmospheric concentrations are in decline, thanks to global production and consumption controls imposed by the Montreal Protocol. In recent years, the rates of decline of CFC atmospheric concentrations, especially for CFC-11 (CCl3F), are not as large as anticipated under the Protocol, resulting in renewed efforts to estimate CFC consumption and/or emissions to possibly identify new or poorly quantified sources. AbstractAustralian emissions of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) have been estimated from atmospheric CFC observations by both inverse modelling and interspecies correlation techniques, and from CFC production, import and consumption data compiled by industry and government. Australian and global CFC emissions show similar temporal behaviour, with emissions peaking in the late-1980s and then declining by ~10% per year through to the present. Australian CFC emissions since 1978 account for less than 1% of global emissions and therefore make a correspondingly small contribution to stratospheric ozone depletion. The current CFC emissions in Australia are likely from ‘banks’ of closed-cell foams, and refrigeration–air conditioning equipment now more than 20 years old. There is no evidence of renewed consumption or emissions of CFCs in Australia. The reduction in CFC emissions has made a significant contribution to reducing Australian greenhouse gas emissions.

Renewable generation capacity and reliability assessments for resilient active distribution networks based on time-sequence production simulation

The penetration of renewable generation will affect the energy utilization efficiency, economic benefit and reliability of the active distribution network (ADN). This paper proposes a time-sequence production simulation (TSPS) method for renewable generation capacity and reliability assessments in ADN considering two operational status: the normal status and the fault status. During normal operation, an optimal dispatch model is proposed to promote the renewable consumption and increase the economic benefit. When a failure occurs, the renewable generators are partitioned into islands for resilient power supply and reliability improvement. A novel dynamic island partition model is presented based on mixed integer second-order cone programming (MISOCP). The effectiveness of the proposed TSPS method is demonstrated in a standard network integrated with historical data of load and renewable generations.

The nexus of environmental quality with renewable consumption, immigration, and healthcare in the US: wavelet and gradual-shift causality approaches.

Given that the volume of carbon emissions in the US is a significant share of the global greenhouse gas emissions, some salient factors are being currently examined so as to reverse the threat to global environmental sustainability. To this regard, the current study investigates the co-movement and long-term and short-term causal relationship between CO2 emission (a proxy for environmental quality) and renewable consumption, immigration, and healthcare by using the wavelet coherence approach which primarily provides information on dynamic correlations over time and for different time scales. The coherence approach allows the one-dimensional time data into the bi-dimensional time-frequency sphere between the variables. In addition to investigating the causal relationship between CO2 and renewable consumption, immigration, and healthcare, this study also employs gradual-shift causality and Toda-Yamamoto causality tests. With this, the study found a high variation for CO2 emission in the US at 8 scales (8 quarters) from 1999 to 2008. Additionally, there is significant feedback causality between CO2 emission and renewable consumption at different scales while a positive correlation between the variables is observed in the short run. Similarly, the result reveals that immigration significantly causes CO2 emission in the US from 2008 to 2010 and a two-way causality is detected between CO2 emission and healthcare at different frequencies and time period. Moreover, the Toda-Yamamoto causality and gradual-shift causality tests provide supportive evidence to the outcomes of the wavelet coherence-based causality test in this study. Overall, the investigation offers significant policy directive especially toward addressing the potential adverse effects from the country's immigration and healthcare amendments.

Renewables, food (in)security, and inflation regimes in the coastline Mediterranean countries (CMCs): the environmental pros and cons.

In the present (twenty-first) century, the pertinent challenge of attaining the regime of food security with low pollution amidst the drive for sustainable economy and energy efficiency is core to governance and intergovernmental agencies. Therefore, in an attempt to investigate environmental issues among the coastline Mediterranean countries (CMCs) for the first time, the current study examines the dynamic long-run nexus of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions with food production and inflation rate over the annual period 1995-2014. Using a dynamic Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) approach, the consumption of renewable energy in the panel of sixteen (16) CMCs is empirically observed to be an efficient policy vehicle for mitigating CO2 emissions. Also, in all the examined CMCs, consumption of renewables is observed to cause significant decline in CO2 emissions, thus securing a sustainable environment. However, in the long run and in the panel of CMCs, the study reveals that increase in food production (a drive toward food security) increases environmental risk. Additionally, the study found that high inflation regime in the panel CMCs is associated with low CO2 emissions especially in the long-run, thus necessitating efficient policy mechanism. In adopting the genetic resources of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources, as well as employing price control policy, the members of the CMCs might have unearthed a suitable policy directive in effectively sustaining environmental quality.

The Nexus between Energy Consumption, Biodiversity, and Economic Growth in Lancang-Mekong Cooperation (LMC): Evidence from Cointegration and Granger Causality Tests.

This work is proposed to examine the relationships between energy consumption, biodiversity, and economic growth for China and five countries in the Indochina Peninsula, which are Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam, who also belong to Lancang-Mekong Cooperation, for the time span from 1991 to 2014. For this purpose, this work adopted autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) through a dynamic simulation process. The estimation outcomes indicate that the nexus of the economic growth and energy consumption are diversified in fossil energy consumption and renewable consumption, respectively. The results are consistent with the fact that renewable energy is an alternative to fossil fuels, and traditional energy is still in the dominant position. This work is expected to serve as a first-hand examination on Lancang-Mekong Cooperation by adding innovative perspectives into existing research. Meanwhile, policy implications will also be discussed in this work.

Stability check of doubly fed induction generator (DFIG) micro grid power system

As of late, expanding interest of renewable energy and consumption of non-renewable energy source have prompted developing advancement of renewable energy technology, for example, wind energy. Wind energy has turned out to be one of the reliable sources of renewable energy, which requests extra transmission capacity and better methods for sustaining system reliability. As of now, doubly fed induction generator wind turbine is the most well-known wind turbine. This paper focuses on DFIG wind farm design using MATLAB/SIMULINK and also investigates the issues of the system stability of the DFIG wind turbine micro grid power system. This analysis includes the changes of voltage, current, real power and reactive power based on various conditions of the power system.

Environmental income in economic growth of a large open economy for the era of eco-urbanization

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to show that the environmental income drives economic growth of a large open country. Design/methodology/approach The authors detect that the relative environmental income has double effect of “conspicuous consumption” on the international renewable resource stock changes when a new social norm shapes to environmental-friendly behaviors by using normal macroeconomic approaches. Findings Every unit of extra demand for renewable resource consumption increases the net premium of domestic capital asset. Even if the technology spillovers are inefficient to the substitution of capital to labor force in a real business cycle, the relative income with scale effect increases drives savings to investment. In this case, the renewable resource consumption promotes both the reproduction to a higher level and saving the potential cost of environmental improvement. Even if without scale effects, the loss of technology inefficient can be compensated by net positive consumption externality for economic growth in a sustainable manner. Research limitations/implications It implies how to earn the environment income determines the future pathway of China’s rural conversion to the era of eco-urbanization. Originality/value We test the tax incidence to demonstrate an experimental taxation for environmental improvement ultimately burdens on international consumption side.

Scheduling model of power system with renewable energy and transaction mode of direct electricity purchase by large consumers considering network security constraints

The policy of transaction mode of direct electricity purchase by large consumers will further reduce the power system scheduling space. When large-scale non-controllable wind turbines and photovoltaic power stations are connected to the system, the optimal scheduling of the system will face even more severe challenges. In order to analyse the impact of the direct purchase of large consumers on the system capacity of renewable energy, this paper proposes a scheduling model of power system with renewable energy and transaction mode of direct electricity purchase by large consumers considering network security constraints. By taking into account the network security constraints, this model can compute large power system and analyse the impact of the direct electricity purchase unit access node on renewable consumption capacity of the system. To illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed model, a real power system in a northern province of China is used in the case study. The consumed renewable energy is calculated and the reason for the wind and solar power curtailment is analysed. The influence of real-time price, contract size, and the unit access node of the direct electricity purchase on renewable energy consumption capacity of the system is analysed.

Stability Assessment on Doubly Fed Induction Generator (DFIG) Wind Turbine Micro Grid Power System

As of late, expanding interest of renewable energy and consumption of non-renewable energy source have prompted developing advancement of renewable energy technology, for example, wind energy. Wind energy has turned out to be one of the reliable sources of renewable energy, which requests extra transmission capacity and better methods for sustaining system reliability. As of now, doubly fed induction generator wind turbine is the most well-known wind turbine. This paper focuses on DFIG wind farm design using MATLAB/SIMULINK and also investigates the issues of the system stability of the DFIG wind turbine micro grid power system. This analysis includes the changes of voltage, current, real power and reactive power based on various conditions of the power system.

Low Carbon Transport: Ready to Pay a Car Tax? Lithuanian Case

Paper analyses road transport indicators and citizen’s attitudes as well as willingness to pay a car tax in Lithuania. Increasing motorization rate and relatively old car fleet contribute to the increasing carbon emissions in road transport sector, despite some improvement in renewables consumption. As one of the possible policy measures to change car fleet and gain budget revenues a car tax could be applied. Respondents express some willingness to pay a car tax, however willingness to pay is much lower to compare to the intended tax. Factors like incomes and age were the predictors of willingness to pay. Ones with higher incomes were ready to pay bigger car tax. In addition, environmental awareness rising could be and good step before introducing such taxes, as well as more detail analysis of the best taxation approach is needed.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.erem.74.2.21498

Model Perencanaan Energi Hijau Menggunakan Metode Computable General Equilibrium

Energy is a vital element in our daily life. In line with the demands of energy needs, energy, which is influenced by population and economic growth, has increased continuously. The use of energy is still dominated by fossil energy which is become very limited and the output has not been carried out optimally. In order to realize national’s energy independence and energy sustainability, energy planning is very important for the basic of energy policies management. The objective of this research is to predict the sustainability of new and renewable energy consumption based on National’s Energy policy by the end of 2025 in West Java. This research used the Computational General Equilibrium (CGE) method as an approach to describe the energy balance between supply and demand. The simulation was done using a Green Energy (GREN) scenario by adding several key planning with the projection year in 2016-2025. The results show that the increasing of new and renewable consumption’s percentage in 2025 was 12%. It could be concluded that in 2025, the prediction of the sustainability of new and renewable energy consumption in West Java has reach 23%.

THE IMPACT OF RENEWABLE ENERGY CONSUMPTION ON CARBON DIOXIDE EMISSIONS - THE CASE OF SOUTH AMERICAN COUNTRIES

The impact of renewable energy consumption on the carbon dioxide emissions was analyzed for a panel of ten South American countries in a period from 1980 to 2012. The Autoregressive Distributed Lag Methodology was used in order to decompose the total effect of renewable energy consumption on the carbon dioxide emissions in its short- and long-run components. The results indicate that the consumption of renewable energy reduce the carbon dioxide emissions in -0.0420 % when the consumption of alternative sources increases in 1% in short-run. The empirical evidence shows that the renewable consumption plays an important role in reducing CO2 emissions and that the economic growth and energy consumption in the South American countries are still based on fossil fuels. Keywords: Environmental, Energy economics, Econometric.

Does the Combustion of Biomass Increase the Efficiency of Heating Companies? Evidence from Slovakia

Over the last decade, the consumption of renewable energy within the EU increased by 66%, and corporations have recognized that heating with wood waste is a cost-effective response to fluctuating fuel prices and a means of avoiding waste disposal costs. The main objective of this paper was to determine whether the combustion of biomass compared with the use of fossil fuels as the primary heat source would increase the efficiency in Slovak heating companies. This research was evaluated via methods of synthesis, analyses, and financial analyses. The survey found that heating companies with combined productions had better economic results. Based on the peer group comparison, heating companies using renewable resources achieved remarkably higher performance indicators. Among renewable energy sources, total biomass plays an important role and accounted for just over two thirds (64%) of the gross inland energy consumption of renewables in the EU. Wood pellets and agglomerates are currently the most economical way of converting biomass into fuel and are a fast-growing source of energy in Europe. The economic efficiency and key performance indicators strongly depend on the input prices of the energy carriers. In the last decade, the cost of heat produced from natural gas amounted on average to two to three times the cost of deciduous wood. Biomass production can generate employment, and if intensive agriculture is replaced by less intensively managed energy crops, there are likely to be environmental benefits, such as reduced leaching of fertilizers and reduced use of pesticides.

The role of renewable energy consumption and commercial services trade in carbon dioxide reduction: Evidence from 25 developing countries

Developing countries play a dominant role in global carbon emissions. This study, for the first time, uses a panel of 25 major developing countries during the years 1996–2012 to explore the role of renewable energy consumption and commercial services trade in generating carbon emissions. The share and size of renewables consumption are both analysed for comparison purpose. Granger causality tests show that long-run bidirectional Granger causalities exist between economic growth, renewable energy consumption, international commercial services trade, and carbon emissions. Panel co-integration tests identify that long-run equilibrium exist between analysis variables. We also apply fully modified ordinary least squares (FMOLS) and dynamic ordinary least squares (DOLS) for panel estimates. The Empirical results indicate that economic growth has significant effects on carbon emissions; the Environmental Kuznets Curve hypothesis is verified; increasing the share of renewable energy consumption contributes to carbon reduction; increasing the size of renewable energy consumption contrarily raised emissions; expanding commercial services trade could reduce carbon emissions. Our findings suggest that developing countries should promote commercial services trade and the share of renewable energy consumption for low-carbon economic growth.

Re-visiting the renewable energy–economic growth nexus

PurposeThis paper aims to investigate the dynamic relationship between renewable energy and economic growth in African OPEC member countries (Angola, Algeria and Nigeria).Design/methodology/approachThe fully modified ordinary least squares technique for heterogeneous cointegrated panels (Pedroni, 2000) is used to estimate the parameters of the model.FindingsThe study revealed four main findings. First, there is a bidirectional causality between renewable energy and economic growth in the long and the short run. Second, a bidirectional causality exists between non-renewable energy and economic growth in the short and long run. Third, a bidirectional causality exists between CO2 emissions and economic growth. Fourth, a unidirectional causality was also found between CO2 emissions and non-renewable energy consumption with the direction of causality stemming from the consumption of non-renewable energy to CO2 emissions.Practical implicationsBecause renewable consumption enhances growth, OPEC-member Africa countries should encourage investment in modern renewable sources that has high conversion efficiency such as solar, wind and hydro to strengthen their response to mitigating the impacts of climate change.Originality/valueThis study applies multiple methods to analyze the relationship between renewable energy and economic growth in African OPEC countries.