Concerns regarding environmental sustainability have generally been an important element in achieving long-term development objectives. However, developing countries struggle to deal with these concerns, which all require specific treatment. As a result, this study explores the interaction between financial development, renewable energy consumption, technological innovations, and CO2 emissions in India from 1980 to 2019, taking into account the critical role of economic progress and urbanization. The Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model is used to quantify long-run dynamics, while the Vector Error Correction Model is used to identify causal direction (VECM). According to the study’s conclusions, financial development has a considerable positive impact on CO2 emissions. The coefficient of renewable energy consumption and technical innovations, on the other hand, is strongly negative in both the short and long run, indicating that increasing these measures will reduce CO2 emission... [more]

The article aims to identify the latest trends in research on renewable energy, sustainability and the environment. A total of 92,873 publications from 123 Scopus sources for 2020−2021 are compared using the scoping review method. The results show that the most cited works in this sample are those by authors from the Asian region. The research of these authors focuses on the security, efficiency and reliability of separate elements in energy systems. Besides, the paper considers the problems regarding COVID disease along with the renewable energy sources, perovskite and organic solar panels, nanostructured materials and high energy density. Finally, the paper analyses applications of computer science methods in research on renewable energy, sustainability and the environment. The findings evidently show that recent advancements in computer science methods were not extensively used in the discussed research domain and give a great room for novel strategies of prognosing, simulation and... [more]

With a growing demand for safe, clean, and affordable energy, countries across the world are now seeking to create and rapidly develop renewable energy (RE) businesses. The success of these businesses often hinges on their ability to translate RE into sustainable value for energy consumers and the multiple stakeholders in the energy industry. Such value includes low production costs due to an abundance of natural resources (e.g., wind, water, sunlight), and public health benefits from reduced environmental pollution. Despite the potential for value creation, many RE businesses have struggled to create affordable energy as abundant as that which is produced by traditional fossil fuels. The rationale being that traditional RE sources emanating from natural resources tend to rely on unpredictable weather conditions. Therefore, to help RE businesses deliver sustainable value, we should leverage disruptive innovation that is less dependent on natural resources. This paper is one of the firs... [more]

Sustaining economic growth while reducing dependence on fossil fuels remains a challenge for our world to fight against climate change and therefore finding a way to promote economic growth and increase renewable energy use is needed. This paper uses a 22-year panel dataset (1994−2015) of 9 countries in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations provided by the World Bank World Development Indicators to examine the impact of medium- and high-tech export on renewable energy use. We employ a fixed-effects regression model with the Driscoll−Kraay nonparametric covariance matrix estimator to account for sectoral and temporal dependence. We also control for inflation, employment, population growth, and gross domestic product per capita in our estimations. Our results demonstrate a U-shaped association between medium- and high-tech export and renewable energy consumption of these economies. The results propose that enhancing medium- and high-tech export could be a feasible solution for promo... [more]

The growth in renewable energy integration over the past few years, primarily fueled by the drop in capital cost, has revealed the requirement for more sustainable methods of integration. This paper presents a collocated hybrid plant consisting of solar photovoltaic (PV) and Ternary pumped-storage hydro (TPSH) and designs controls that integrate the PV plant such that the behavior and the controllability of the hybrid plant are similar to those of a conventional plant within operational constraints. The PV array control and hybrid plant control implement a neural−network-based framework to coordinate the response, de-loading, and curtailment of multiple arrays with the response of the TPSH. With the help of the designed controls, a symbiotic relationship is developed between the two energy resources, where the PV compensates for the TPSH nonlinearities and provides required speed of response, while the TPSH firms the PV system and allows the PV to be integrated using its existing infra... [more]

In recent years, one of the key postulates in the European Union’s policy has become the development of renewable energy sources. In order to achieve the desired synergy effect, the idea of combining two selected sources of energy appeared. This article presents a technical and economic analysis of a hybrid connection of a ground source heat pump with a photovoltaic installation. Taking into account the heat demand of the building, a ground heat pump with a catalog nominal heating power of 25 kW was selected. This article presents the problem of the economic profitability of using a hybrid combination of a heat pump and photovoltaic panels in domestic hot water and central heating systems. The justification for the use of such heat sources in these installations is due to global trends and the gradual departure from conventional energy sources such as oil or gas boilers. This paper presents the economic and ecological results of using the pump heat connected together with photovoltaic... [more]

Presently, the world is undergoing exciting haste to install photovoltaic (PV) systems in industry, residential/commercial buildings, transportation, deserts, street lights, and many other applications. Solar photovoltaic energy systems are clean and reliable energy sources that are unlimited, unlike their fossil fuel counterparts. The energy market is rapidly growing globally with newly and cumulative installed capacities of about 37.6 GW and 139.6 GW, accounting for 53% and 55%, respectively, in 2017, making it one of the fastest-growing industries. The cumulative photovoltaic installations are projected to have reached 600 GW worldwide and are projected to reach 4500 GW by 2050 because of the strategies and policies of many countries. In 2021, more than three-quarters of the developed countries are now home to one solar installation. This article evaluates a critical and extensive review of the contributions of solar photovoltaic systems to national development. The approach follows... [more]

In the context of China’s dual carbon target, Beijing, as the capital of China, should play an exemplary role in carbon emission reduction. On the premise of optimizing high-emission sectors such as coal and industry, Beijing is still a certain distance from the goal of carbon neutrality. Therefore, on the basis of Beijing’s energy resource endowment, considering Beijing’s economic development and carbon neutrality goals and scientifically and reasonably planning Beijing’s carbon emission reduction path are important tasks. We construct an energy structure optimization model to achieve the goal of carbon neutrality by 2050. The model analysis concludes that the residents and transportation sectors will account for a large proportion of Beijing’s total carbon emissions in the future. To achieve the goal of carbon neutrality, the electricity substitution of fossil energy and the high proportion of external power are two necessary measures, and the optimal path of carbon emission reductio... [more]

If global energy consumption returns to its pre-pandemic growth rate, it will be almost impossible to transition to a zero-emission or net-zero-emission energy system by 2050 in the absence of large-scale CO2 removal. Since relying on unproven technologies for CO2 removal is speculative and risky, this paper considers an energy descent scenario for reaching zero greenhouse gas emissions from energy by 2050. To drive the rapid transition from fossil fuels to carbon-free energy sources and ensure demand reduction, funding is needed urgently in order to implement four strategies: (i) technology change, i.e., implementing the growth of zero-carbon energy production, end-use energy efficiency and ‘green’ energy carriers, together with ongoing R&D on CO2 removal; (ii) reducing climate impacts; (iii) reducing energy consumption by social and behavioural changes; and (iv) improving human wellbeing while increasing social justice. Modern monetary theory explains how monetary sovereign governmen... [more]

Energy poverty, defined as a lack of access to reliable electricity and reliance on traditional biomass resources for cooking, affects over a billion people daily. The World Health Organization estimates that household air pollution from inefficient stoves causes more premature deaths than malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV/AIDS. Increasing demand for energy has led to dramatic increases in emissions. The need for reliable electricity and limiting emissions drives research on Resilient Hybrid Energy Systems (RHESs), which provide cleaner energy through combining wind, solar, and biomass energy with traditional fossil energy, increasing production efficiency and reliability and reducing generating costs and emissions. Microgrids have been shown as an efficient means of implementing RHESs, with some focused mainly on reducing the environmental impact of electric power generation. The technical challenges of designing, implementing, and applying microgrids involve conducting a cradle-to-grave... [more]

(1) The use of renewable energy for power and heat supply is one of the strategies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. As only 14% of German households are supplied with renewable energy, a shift is necessary. This shift should be realized with the lowest possible environmental impact. This paper assesses the environmental impacts of changes in energy generation and distribution, by integrating the life cycle assessment (LCA) method into energy system models (ESM). (2) The integrated LCA is applied to a case study of the German neighborhood of Herne, (i) to optimize the energy supply, considering different technologies, and (ii) to determine the environmental impacts of the base case (status quo), a cost-optimized scenario, and a CO2-optimized scenario. (3) The use of gas boilers in the base case is substituted with CHPs, surface water heat pumps and PV-systems in the CO2-optimized scenario, and five ground-coupled heat pumps and PV-systems for the cost-optimized scenario. This technol... [more]

The development of energy production from renewable sources includes the production of energy from photovoltaic installations by prosumers. In Europe, RES development is driven by political goals and requires subsidies during the deployment period, at least as long as the cost of renewable electricity does not reaches grid parity. The study attempts to determine the importance of factors in the development of energy production by prosumers from PV installations in Polish regions. In 2019, the ‘Moj Prad’ program was introduced, applying subsidies to investment costs and the settlement of energy production in the net-metering system. Almost 900 thousand prosumer PV installations were built by the end of 2021, with a total capacity of 5.9 GW. Solar energy share grew from 0.1 to 2.1%. Spatial econometrics models were use in research to determine factors of prosumer PV systems development in Poland (at NUTS-2). Spatial regimes were found in the studied regions, as indicated by a positive au... [more]

Among all the energy production technologies based on renewables, the photovoltaic panels are the ones with the highest rate of development and applications worldwide. In this context, significant efforts are put into research on innovative materials in order to improve the performance of photovoltaic cells. Nevertheless, possibilities available to enhance the energy yield of existing technologies also exist and are explored, such as the cooling of photovoltaic modules. This approach can decrease the mean operation temperature of photovoltaic cells, leading to an increase in efficiency and energy produced. In the present paper, this method is investigated by developing and testing a dedicated water cooling system for photovoltaic panels. In order to investigate the performance of the cooling system, two market-available monocrystalline photovoltaic panels with a power of 50 and 310 Wp were tested under laboratory and real operation conditions, respectively. Based on the results obtaine... [more]

Current research assesses the impact of industrialization and the renewable energy sector on greenhouse gas emissions, proxied by CO2 emissions in Europe and Central Asia. We rely on a two-step system GMM estimator on a sample of 48 countries over the period 2000−2018. Empirical results show that industrialization has a positive effect on CO2 emissions: a 10% increase in industry value added as % of GDP leads to an increase of 2.6% in CO2 emissions. In contrast, renewable energy mitigates CO2 emissions. Ten percentage points increase in renewable energy consumption reduces CO2 emissions per capita by 2.2%. The interaction term between renewable energy and industry value added is negative, suggesting that renewable energy consumption compensates for the negative effect of industrialization on environmental quality. Our main results also confirm the U-shaped inverted relationship between GDP per capita and CO2 emissions. Our study has a number of policy implications and avenues for futur... [more]

This paper is a review of research undertaken, and subsequent policy change enacted, in the years 2018 to 2022 regarding the integration of cooking loads and needs into modern energy planning. Building on an earlier paper which described how the dominant global approaches to tackling the enduring problem of biomass-fuelled cooking was failing, and how a new UK Aid programme (Oct 2018) would be seeking to intentionally change international energy policy towards cooking and enable a significant transition in energy use, in this paper we review whether this strategy is being adopted by researchers, governments, and the private sector across the world and whether it is likely to make a significant contribution to the fulfilment of Sustainable Development Goal 7. In particular, the call is for integrated planning of modern energy inclusive of cooking loads—the potential ‘Mutual Support’ that both can lend to each other. The review considers the international commitments made by donors and g... [more]

In the past decades, carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions have become an important issue for many researchers and policy makers. The focus of scientists and experts in the area is mainly on lowering the CO2 emission levels. In this article, panel data is analyzed with an econometric model, to estimate the impact of renewable energy, biofuels, bioenergy efficiency, population, and urbanization level on CO2 emissions in European Union (EU) countries. Our results underline the fact that urbanization level has a negative impact on increasing CO2 emissions, while biofuels, bioenergy production, and renewable energy consumption have positive and direct impacts on reducing CO2 emissions. Moreover, population growth and urbanization level are negatively correlated with CO2 emission levels. The authors’ findings suggest that the public policies at the national level must encourage the consumption of renewable energy and biofuels in the EU, while population and urbanization level should come along wit... [more]

More than 1.2 billion kW wind and solar power generation will be integrated in China by 2030. The new provincial renewable portfolio standard, officially implemented in 2020, establishes an efficient bridge between rapid capacity growth and limited accommodation capability. A data-driven prospect analysis framework was proposed to evaluate the activated potential under two kinds of nearby accommodation approaches and to explore the completion prospect of this new obligated quota from provincial levels. Empirical results illustrate diverse prospects across regions. Particularly, it is hard for two kinds of provinces to complete their obligated quotas merely via the single nearby accommodation approach: The first one is close to renewable energy resources but lacks flexible peak regulation capability in Northeast and Northwest China, and the other is close to the nationwide load center but lacks nearby integration from renewables in Southeast, North, and Middle China. Therefore, the path... [more]

Enzymatic biodiesel production has attracted tremendous interest due to its well-recognized advantages. However, high enzyme costs limit the application of enzymatic processes in industrial production. In the past decade, great improvements have been achieved in the lab and the industrial scale, and the production cost of the enzymatic process has been reduced significantly, which has led to it being economically competitive compared to the chemical process. This paper summarizes the progress achieved in enzymatic biodiesel research and commercialization, including reducing enzyme cost, expanding low-quality raw materials, and novel reactor designs. The advantages and disadvantages of different enzymatic processes are also compared.

Modern electrical grids are transitioning from a centralized generation architecture to an architecture with significant distributed, intermittent generation. This transition means that the formerly sharp distinction between energy producers (utility companies) and consumers (residences, businesses, etc.) are blurring: end-users both produce and consume energy, making energy management and public policy more complex. The goal of the Open Power Quality (OPQ) project is to design and implement a low cost, distributed power quality sensor network that provides useful new forms of information about modern electrical grids to producers, consumers, researchers, and policy makers. In 2019, we performed a pilot study involving the deployment of an OPQ sensor network at the University of Hawaii microgrid for three months. Results of the pilot study validate the ability of OPQ to collect accurate power quality data in a way that provides useful new insights into electrical grids.

Energy consumption is a critical issue for the communications network operators, impacting deeply the cost of the services, as well as the ecological footprint. Network slicing architecture for 5G mobile communications enables multiple independent virtual networks to be created on top of a common shared physical infrastructure. Each network slice needs different types of resources, including energy, to fulfill the demands requested by each application, operator, or vertical market. The existing literature on network slicing is mainly targeted at the partition of network resources; however, the corresponding management of energy consumption is an unconsidered critical concern. This paper analyzes the requirements for an energy-aware 5G network slicing provisioning according to the 3GPP specifications, proposes an architecture, and studies the strategies to provide efficient energy consumption in terms of renewable and non-renewable sources. NFV and SDN technologies are the essential ena... [more]

In this work, we review papers that employ game theoretic tools to study the operation and design of modern electric grids. We consider four topics in this context: energy trading, energy balancing, grid planning, and system reliability, and we demonstrate the advantages of using game-theoretic approaches for analyzing complex interactions among independent players. The results and conclusions provide insights regarding many aspects of design and operation, such as efficient methodologies for expansion planning, cyber-security, and frequency stability, or fair-benefit allocation among players. A central conclusion is that modeling the system from the perspective of one entity with unlimited information and control span is often impractical, so correct modeling of the selfish behavior of independent players may be critical for the development of future power systems. Another conclusion is that correct usage of incentives by appropriate regulation or sophisticated pricing mechanisms may... [more]

Increasing needs for taller wind turbines with bigger capacities, intended for places with high wind velocities or at higher altitudes, have led to new technologies in the wind energy industry. A recently introduced structural system for onshore wind turbine towers is the hybrid steel tower. Comprehension of the environmental response of this hybrid steel structural system is warranted. Even though life cycle assessments (LCAs) for conventional wind turbine tubular towers exist, the environmental performance of this new hybrid structure has not been reported. The present paper examines the LCA of 185 m tall hybrid towers. Considerations made for the LCA procedure are meticulously described, including particular attention at the erection and transportation stage. The highest environmental impacts arise during the manufacturing stage followed by the erection stage. The tower is the component with the largest carbon emissions and energy requirements. The obtained LCA footprints of hybrid... [more]

Combined heat and power systems dedicated to micro-scale applications are currently increasing in popularity. The use of such systems is beneficial from the standpoint of increasing the usage of renewable energy, increasing energy efficiency and reducing CO2 emissions into the atmosphere. This paper shows two examples of prototypical micro-cogeneration systems powered by biomass. In the first, smaller one, electricity is generated in thermoelectric generators using heat from the wood-fired stove. The second one is equipped with a 100 kWt batch boiler and operates according to a modified Rankine cycle. The energy and ecological analysis were conducted and discussed, including selected aspects of heat and power generation and gaseous pollutant emission. Measurements were performed using a dedicated control and measurement station with a PLC controller. As was shown, thermoelectric generators operated respectively with the power of 22.5 We in the case of the air-cooled unit and 31.2 We in... [more]

The sustainable development of the energy sector through the implementation of renewable energy (RE) technology has been a primary concern for the government of Malaysia since the 1990s. Developing RE technology in rural areas is also one of the most important energy strategies. One of the most important requirements for the successful adoption of renewable energy technology is the public acceptance of this technology. This article examines the public acceptance of RE (wind and solar) technologies among rural residents in Mersing, Malaysia. This study is conducted in conjunction with the development of the hybrid wind−solar RE generation system for the Marine Ecosystem Research Centre (EKOMAR), which located in Mersing. To investigate the public acceptance of RE technologies, two surveys were conducted, before and after the installation of the hybrid wind−solar RE generation system. The findings revealed that RE innovations, such as wind and solar energy, were well known among 54.7% an... [more]

The alcohols ethanol and 1-butanol are interesting options as blending components for renewable fuels. We studied whether it is possible to mix these alcohols with a little refined material, rapeseed oil, to obtain stable fuel samples. At room temperature, the stable samples consisted of rapeseed oil blended with butanol at 5 vol-%, 10 vol-%, 20 vol-%, 30 vol-% and one sample of rapeseed oil with 5 vol-% of ethanol. The samples’ fuel properties analysed were kinematic viscosity (at 40 °C), density (at 15 °C) and surface tension. Cold filter plugging point was measured for rapeseed oil with 20 vol-% and 30 vol-% of butanol. Stability of butanol or ethanol and rapeseed oil blends can be achieved at the studied volumes. The density of neat rapeseed oil and all the alcohol−rapeseed oil blends met the requirements set for residual marine fuels. The 30 vol-% butanol−rapeseed oil blend met the requirements for distillate marine oil for density, and almost for kinematic viscosity. The blends a... [more]