Rural energy development in Iran: Non-renewable and renewable resources

Environmental life cycle assessment (LCA) is today an important methodology to quantify the life cycle based environmental impacts of products, services or organisations. Since the very first LCA studies, the cumulative energy demand CED (also called ‘primary energy consumption’) has been one of the key indicators being addressed. Despite its popularity, there is no harmonised approach yet and the standards and guidelines define the cumulative energy demand differently. In this paper, an overview of existing and applied life cycle based energy indicators and a unifying approach to establish characterisation factors for the cumulative energy demand indicator are provided. The CED approaches are illustrated in a building’s LCA case study. The five approaches are classified into two main concepts, namely the energy harvested and the energy harvestable concepts. The two concepts differ by the conversion efficiency of the energy collecting facility. A unifying ‘energy harvested’ approach is proposed based on four theses, which ensure consistent accounting among renewable and non renewable energy resources. The indicator proposed is compared to four other CED indicators, differing in the characterisation factors of fossil and biomass resources (upper or lower heating value), the characterisation factor of uranium and the characterisation factors of renewable energy resources (amount harvested or amount harvestable). The comparison of the five approaches is based on the cumulative energy demand of a newly constructed building of the city of Zurich covering the whole life cycle, including manufacturing and construction, replacement and use phase, and end of life. The cumulative energy demand of the life cycle of the building differs between 336 MJ oil-eq/m2a (‘CED uranium low’) and 836 MJ oil-eq/m2a (‘CED energy statistics’). The main differences occur in the use phase. The main reason for the large differences in the results are the different concepts to determine the characterisation factors for renewable and nuclear energy resources. The energy harvested approach ‘CED standard’ is a consistent approach, which quantifies the energy content of all different (renewable and non-renewable) energy resources. The ‘CED standard’ approach and the impact category indicator results computed with this approach reflect the safeguard subject ‘energy resources’ but not (no other) environmental impacts. The energy harvested approach proposed in this paper can readily be implemented in different contexts and applied to various data sets.

Renewable energy resources especially wind and solar energy are emerging as the modern power sources to electrify remote areas. The main reason behind their emergence is due to their environment-friendly behavior, unlimited availability and short period for replenishment over nonrenewable energy resources. Renewable energy resources are much better than nonrenewable energy resources, but the intermittency in renewable energy resources degrades the system performance. In order to overcome the intermittency, multiple hybrid system techniques were proposed in literature that can achieve suitable results but have disadvantages of complicated control structures and high implementation cost. Considering aforementioned shortcomings, a simple balancing approach is proposed to intermix solar and wind energy together so as to utilize the available energy from both sources at a given time. It is very common that solar farms are the dominating source of energy in daytime and summer, while wind farms are the dominating source of energy at night and in winter. The proposed approach delivers maximum possible power to the load by combining dominating and non-dominating resources all the time, hence mitigating the intermittency of individual resources. Compared with other approaches, the proposed approach offers key benefits with redundancy, simple design and low cost, which can be analyzed from simulation results.

Transactive energy integration in future smart rural network electrification

Renewable energy resources like wind, sun, hydropower, geothermal, and biomass are better alternatives for conventional non-renewable energy resources such as fossil fuel reserves. Renewable energy resources are the better technological option to generate clean energy and overcome the depletion of non-renewable energy resources. This paper presents the complete system design of hybrid solar wind charger. The main contribution is to develop a compact system, which utilizes the eternal solar and wind power to solve the major crisis of pollution as well as the scarcity of fossil fuels. The functionality of the proposed system allows a reliable source of power generation for human beings in the energy crisis.

With the view to minimize the energy crisis due to the ever depleting non-renewable energy resources, this research aimed to apply nanotechnology to enhance the efficacy of solar energy power plant – a renewable energy resource. According to literature Concentrated Solar Power Plant system requires heat transfer fluid (HTF) for proficient working. This research reports the synthesis of novel, efficient heat transfer fluid doped with nano sized particle including carbon nanotubes and metal oxide i-e copper oxide. This nano heat transfer fluid (NHTF) has very low melting point in comparison to conventionally prepared molten salt mixture for heat transfer purpose which typically have high melting point characteristically 140°C or higher. Most prominently this NHTF has enhanced thermo-physical properties including high thermal stability and high specific heat capacity. These properties ensures effective increase in thermal energy storage (TES) which is a key factor in solar thermal power plant and make it broad range operating heat transfer fluid.

Renewable energy resources are the major sources of energy for human being and current industrial applications. Exhausting resources such as petroleum, gas, coal and other non-renewable energy resources are depleting day by day and causing global warming. Due to this reason national and international trend of generating energy is moving to the renewable and clean energy resources. Energy from the wind is one of the prominent sources of production of electricity. Wind turbines are employed for electrical energy generation. Many types of AC generators have been employed for converting the rotational energy in form of mechanical energy from wind turbine into electricity. Doubly-fed induction generator is the prominent and escalating kind of generator employed in wind energy conversion system. Energy from the wind might be varied randomly therefore system reliability and stability is needed. The major purpose of this research work is to implement the grid connected wind turbine model and investigate the voltage and current profiles of system at normal condition and transient fault condition.

The strategy for China's rural energy development

This paper presents a process of electrical generator selection and operation for low speed renewable hydrokinetic energy resources. As more renewable energy resources enter the marketplace, generators customized towards unsteady mechanical input power and low speed operation become critical design points. Traditional power generation has relied upon steady operation to which the majority of generators are designed. The process of generator selection for low speed unsteady resources encompasses many design factors and tradeoffs. Generator selection is discussed and evaluated with respect to a low-speed vertical oscillator hydrokinetic energy resource. The complete generator selection entails selecting a generator type, modeling in simulation, and testing in a laboratory setting. This paper lays out the considerations that must be made in order to implement a successful design from the standpoint of power generation in many new and unproven renewable energy resources.

This paper reviews the prospects of available renewable energy resources along with various private and government future project plans to incorporate renewable energy sources and its potentials in perspective of Bangladesh. In an arising country like Bangladesh demand for energy will be burgeoning. Present day, in Bangladesh dearth of energy is ubiquitous and near about 70% of its population is excluded from access to electricity and bulk of the people are living in rural areas. Among several renewable energy resources, the application of solar Photo Voltaic (PV) is renowned although the largest plant based on renewable energy goes into hydroelectricity. Additionally, wind, biogas, mini hydro and tidal are also well known. A plan has been initiated by the Government of Bangladesh (GOB) to generate 5% of the total energy from renewable energy resources within 2015 and 20% by the year of 2020. Through the approved renewable energy policy, the GOB is devoted to facilitate investment in both public and private sectors in renewable energy projects to substitute contemporaneous non-renewable energy resources and escalate the contributions of renewable energy based electricity generation. With this context, review of recent activities on concurrent renewable energy resources is imperative as well as to explore potentials of the resources. However, not all renewable energy sources are suitable to install indiscriminately in all regions, rather there are certain parameters to choose a source of RER for efficacy. After reading this paper, an investor will get significant information about current scenario and steering for future involvement of renewable energy sources in Bangladesh. Furthermore, this paper will be instrumental to select optimum efficacious renewable energy sources for a particular region.

Renewable energy scenario in India: Opportunities and challenges

Including renewable energy resources in integrated resource planning (IRP) requires that utility planning models properly consider the relevant attributes of the different renewable resources in addition to conventional supply-side and demand-side options. Otherwise, a utility`s resource plan is unlikely to have an appropriate balance of the various resource options. The current trend toward regulatory set-asides for renewable resources is motivated in part by the perception that the capabilities of current utility planning models are inadequate with regard to renewable resources. Adequate modeling capabilities and utility planning practices are a necessary prerequisite to the long-term penetration of renewable resources into the electric utility industry`s resource mix. This report presents a review of utility planning models conducted for the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). The review examines the capabilities of utility planning models to address key issues in the choice between renewable resources and other options. The purpose of this review is to provide a basis for identifying high priority areas for advancing the state of the art.

Climate change, limited fossil fuel availability and the dependency on energy carrier imports lead the European Union to the formulation of an energy policy for Europe. The EU sets the following criteria for its future energy supply: sustainability, security of supply and competitiveness. Considering the carbon dioxide emissions of fossil fuels and the unsolved problem of the ultimate disposal of radioactive waste, only renewable energy can currently be considered sustainable if applied in a socially acceptable way and in accordance with nature conservation. The use of renewable energy can also reduce the dependency on energy carrier imports. Contrary to fossil fuels, renewable energy will become cheaper in the future due to technological learning. The main disadvantage of some renewable energy resources is their fluctuating availability. Adaptation of the energy supply system must take place especially in the power sector in order to reliably cover fluctuating demand with fluctuating resources at any time. In this work, the energy system model ‘REMix’ (Renewable Energy Mix for Sustainable Electricity Supply) is developed. It uses data on the availability of renewable energy across Europe and North Africa (EUNA) to dimension low-cost power supply structures for the EUNA-region, or parts of it, under specific conditions, such as specified shares of renewable energy in the power supply or specified national self-supply shares. The model takes into account the costs of generation technologies, transmission lines and storage units, and finds a combination of these technologies and their geographic locations that is least-cost under the given assumptions. A geographic information system was used for the analysis of the installable capacities and power generation potentials of typical technologies for harnessing renewable energy resources. This analysis is described and the potentials of solar PV, solar CSP, wind onshore and wind offshore, biomass, hydro and geothermal power plants are shown in tables and maps. The data are used as input into a linear programming energy system model which uses them as constraints on the power supply system to be dimensioned. The model, its sensitivity to input parameter variations and a test application are described. The findings confirm the basic findings of other work in this field: transmission lines can be a crucial element of a low-cost, renewable-energy-based electricity supply because they enable balancing effects in a large grid and the use of the highest quality resources even in remote areas, such as deserts or at sea. However, the international cooperation that is necessary to reach the cost-minimum for a given supply task may not be reached by politics or resulting dependencies may be opposed to political goals. Therefore, REMix was built such that countries can be examined individually and the influence of different parameters on their energy supply costs and structure can be investigated. In the test model application, power supply systems for 36 regions in Europe and North Africa, almost all individual countries, are designed with REMix as island grids on the one hand and on the other hand as a network without transmission restrictions (other than the costs of the transmission lines). The model shows that in certain regions the island grid electricity costs can be much higher than, only a little higher than, or even lower than the electricity costs in the network, under the given technological and economic assumptions. The sensitivity to parameter variations is shown to be high; the results of the test application must therefore be considered one example of a technically feasible and efficient supply system but cannot claim to be least-cost in general.

Using a significant quantity of fossil fuels has adverse impacts on our lives and will affect future generations. Additionally, there are limited and decreasing numbers of nonrenewable resources around the world. In contrast, renewable resources are not depleted and provide energy with negligible pollution. Wind energy is one of the more common renewable energy resources. This project aims to evaluate Iowa's wind energy potential and to provide suggestions to improve the future well ‐being of this state. A preliminary analysis shows that Iowa has great potential for wind energy. Based on the preliminary analysis, Ames, Iowa, is selected as a case study of its potential in terms of wind energy. Some important characteristics of wind energy, such as mean wind speed, wind distribution, and wind direction are evaluated for Ames. It is observed that although Iowa has the greatest wind power capacity density in the U.S., there are some untapped places in Iowa that can be utilized to harvest wind power. Results indicate that the city of Ames is one of the places that have strong wind speeds. According to the results, if a wind farm is installed in the city of Ames, reliance on non-renewable energy resources will be considerably decreased.

In recent year, alarming rate of natural disasters around the world have demanded the need for operative solution in field of power generation, to control polluted energy sources which are major cause of global warming. Microgrid facilitates penetration of renewable energy sources into the existing distribution systems to reduce the overall carbon footprint of the globe by reducing the dependency on the main grid. Efficient but linear microgrid resource scheduling algorithms are gaining interest in present time due to its simplicity and fast computation. This research paper aims to serve the purposes by designing a mixed integer linear programming based microgrid scheduling problem while various types of scenario, minimize the electricity cost for the utilities also maintain the generation and load balance. The strategy is implemented on a small microgrid to prove its efficacy .In this paper mainly optimal scheduling of microgrid has been done in various scenario, and obtained there global minimum electricity cost to the help of mixed integer linear programming (MILP) algorithm. Microgrid is a small scale type of power grid, which provides the energy locally, its offers integration between distributed energy resources and the locally connected loads. Microgrid able to be operated with the main grid and in standalone mode also ability to transitions between these two modes, the mode of operation of microgrid is depends on the system operating condition. The reliability of power grid is improving more when it’s integrated with the Microgrid and works together. Power exchange with the upper stream grid is done through the point of common coupling (PCC). Microgrid having renewable energy resources i.e. PV, Wind and non-renewable energy resources, DG, FC, and MC connected with the Battery storage type system and locally connected loads. So it is a very reliable scenario, main grid with the microgrid, it is more beneficial, economy and stable types of system. Keywords : Optimal Microgrid Scheduling, Linear Programming DOI : 10.7176/APTA/76-05 Publication date :March 31 st 2019

The transition towards a more affordable, reliable, and sustainable energy provision paradigm is one of the main 21st century challenges that humanity must overcome to protect the planet from the harmful effect caused by climate change. The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has been dramatically increasing since the pre-industrial era. If the increase of green-house gasses emissions continues unabated, this will bring dramatic consequences for planet Earth, compromising eventually the existence of many species, including the human race. To avoid a climate change catastrophe, the share of primary energy coming from renewable energy resources must increase from around 15% in 2015 to 65% in 2050. This energy transition can not rely solely on few successful technologies (i.e., solar photovoltaic, and wind energy), but it must count on a larger variety of technical solutions that are suitable for a wider range of renewable sources and diversity of circumstances. For instance, renewable thermal energy sources for power generation (i.e., geothermal reservoir, biomass fuel, and concentrated solar radiation), can provide a large portion of the world electricity demand in the future. However, the exploitation of a good portion of these sources strongly depends on the market success of technologies such as the Organic Rankine Cycle (ORC) power system. One of the key aspects to make ORC systems economically competitive, especially at the smaller sizes (⇡ 1 − 50 kW), is the realization of highly efficient turbomachinery components. The fluid-dynamic design of ORC turbomachinery significantly differs from the design of traditional machines (i.e., steam and gas turbines), and this is mainly due to the different thermo-physical properties and gas dynamic behavior of the organic working fluids. This means that design methods devised for standard steam and gas turbomachinery can not be used for turbomachinery operating in the Non-ideal compressible fluid dynamics (NICFD) region. Furthermore, no experimental campaigns have ever been carried out to create a body of empirical knowledge to support the design highly efficient ORC turbomachinery. As a consequence, the entire design process of ORC turbomachinery relies only on the use of advanced CFD software. The current trend is to couple CFD tools with numerical optimization techniques in order to automatically obtain optimal flow passage geometries. In particular, adjoint-based methods have clearly demonstrated to be the only optimization technique capable of tackling the multi-stage turbomachinery design problem, in which thousands of design variable must be concurrently optimized. Therefore, the research documented in this PhD dissertation aimed at extending the adjoint method in order to perform the fully-turbulent fluid-dynamic shape optimization of 3D multi-stage ORC turbomachinery. This document contains an extensive introduction, three main chapters, each documenting a building block towards the accomplishment of the main goal of this PhD project, and a final concluding chapter that summarizes all the research outcomes of this work and proposes future steps for research in this field. The first part of the thesis describes the extension of the RANS equations, the convective numerical schemes, and the viscous numerical schemes to the use of complex thermo-physical laws, so to simulate turbulent flows of components working in the NICFD thermodynamic region. The second part documents the derivation of the adjoint solver in order to resolve shape-optimization design problems for 2D single row of ORC turbomachinery. Finally, the last part reports the extension of the adjoint method to 3D multi-stage turbomachinery design.