Refrigerated warehouses as intelligent hubs to integrate renewable energy in industrial food refrigeration and to enhance power grid sustainability

Background Independence from fossil fuels, energy diversification, decarbonisation and energy efficiency are key prerequisites to make a national, regional or continental economy competitive in the global marketplace. As Europe is about to generate 20% of its energy demand from Renewable Energy Sources (RES) by 2020, adequate RES integration and renewable energy storage throughout the entire food cold chain must properly be addressed. Scope and approach Refrigerated warehouses for chilled and frozen foods are large energy consumers and account for a significant portion of the global energy demand. Nevertheless, the opportunity for RES integration in the energy supply of large food storage facilities is often neglected. In situ power generation using RES permits capture of a large portion of virtually free energy, thereby reducing dramatically the running costs and carbon footprint, while enhancing the economic competitiveness. In that context, there exist promising engineering solutions to exploit various renewables in the food preservation sector, in combination with the emerging sustainability-enhancing technology of Cryogenic Energy Storage (CES). Key findings and conclusions Substantial research endeavours are driven by the noble objective to turn the Europe's Energy Union into the world's number one in renewable energies. Integrating RES, in synchrony with CES development and proper control, is capable of both strengthening the food refrigeration sector and improving dramatically the power grid balance and energy system sustainability. Hence, this article aims to familiarise stakeholders of the European and global food preservation industry with state-of-the-art knowledge, know-how, opportunities and professional achievements in the concerned field

Personal Volunteer Computing

We propose personal volunteer computing, a novel paradigm to encourage technical solutions that leverage personal devices, such as smartphones and laptops, for personal applications that require significant computations, such as animation rendering and image processing. The paradigm requires no investment in additional hardware, relying instead on devices that are already owned by users and their community, and favours simple tools that can be implemented part-time by a single developer. We show that samples of personal devices of today are competitive with a top-of-the-line laptop from two years ago. We also propose new directions to extend the paradigm

Cloud BI: Future of business intelligence in the Cloud

In self-hosted environments it was feared that business intelligence (BI) will eventually face a resource crunch situation due to the never ending expansion of data warehouses and the online analytical processing (OLAP) demands on the underlying networking. Cloud computing has instigated a new hope for future prospects of BI. However, how will BI be implemented on Cloud and how will the traffic and demand profile look like? This research attempts to answer these key questions in regards to taking BI to the Cloud. The Cloud hosting of BI has been demonstrated with the help of a simulation on OPNET comprising a Cloud model with multiple OLAP application servers applying parallel query loads on an array of servers hosting relational databases. The simulation results reflected that extensible parallel processing of database servers on the Cloud can efficiently process OLAP application demands on Cloud computing

Relational Cloud: The Case for a Database Service

In this paper, we make the case for â databases as a serviceâ (DaaS), with two target scenarios in mind: (i) consolidation of data management functionality for large organizations and (ii) outsourcing data management to a cloud-based service provider for small/medium organizations. We analyze the many challenges to be faced, and discuss the design of a database service we are building, called Relational Cloud. The system has been designed from scratch and combines many recent advances and novel solutions. The prototype we present exploits multiple dedicated storage engines, provides high-availability via transparent replication, supports automatic workload partitioning and live data migration, and provides serializable distributed transactions. While the system is still under active development, we are able to present promising initial results that showcase the key features of our system. The tests are based on TPC benchmarks and real-world data from epinions.com, and show our partitioning, scalability and balancing capabilities

Refrigerated warehouses as intelligent hubs to integrate renewable energy in industrial food refrigeration and to enhance power grid sustainability

© 2016 Elsevier LtdBackground Independence from fossil fuels, energy diversification, decarbonisation and energy efficiency are key prerequisites to make a national, regional or continental economy competitive in the global marketplace. As Europe is about to generate 20% of its energy demand from Renewable Energy Sources (RES) by 2020, adequate RES integration and renewable energy storage throughout the entire food cold chain must properly be addressed. Scope and approach Refrigerated warehouses for chilled and frozen foods are large energy consumers and account for a significant portion of the global energy demand. Nevertheless, the opportunity for RES integration in the energy supply of large food storage facilities is often neglected. In situ power generation using RES permits capture of a large portion of virtually free energy, thereby reducing dramatically the running costs and carbon footprint, while enhancing the economic competitiveness. In that context, there exist promising engineering solutions to exploit various renewables in the food preservation sector, in combination with the emerging sustainability-enhancing technology of Cryogenic Energy Storage (CES). Key findings and conclusions Substantial research endeavours are driven by the noble objective to turn the Europe's Energy Union into the world's number one in renewable energies. Integrating RES, in synchrony with CES development and proper control, is capable of both strengthening the food refrigeration sector and improving dramatically the power grid balance and energy system sustainability. Hence, this article aims to familiarise stakeholders of the European and global food preservation industry with state-of-the-art knowledge, know-how, opportunities and professional achievements in the concerned field

Demand-Side Flexibility for Energy Transitions: Policy Recommendations for Developing Demand Response

As a follow-up to IRGC's report on demand-side flexibility for energy transitions, this Policy Brief highlights that increasing flexibility in power systems is needed to accommodate higher shares of non-controllable and intermittent renewable generation, and that this requires changes to the market design and regulatory framework, to facilitate the development and deployment of appropriate technologies and market-based instruments (e.g. taxes and subsidies). The Policy Brief focuses on demand response (DR), since it is emerging as a powerful demand-side energy management option to deliver flexibility. Specifically, DR can contribute to reducing overall electricity consumption or shifting demand in such a way that consumption better follows generation, particularly intermittent wind and solar

DEVELOPMENT OF ERP AND OTHER LARGE BUSINESS SYSTEMS IN THE CONTEXT OF NEW TRENDS AND TECHNOLOGIES

This paper presents an overview of terms, concepts, trends and technologies that are relevant to today\u27s business. It describes the basics of data and information integration and flow in a company through a central ERP system with concepts of CRM and SCM. The emergence of big data as a tributary of a huge number of often unstructured data from different sources can become a central problem or opportunity for advancement and achievement of competitive advantages of a company. Ignorance of key figures and/or the non-acceptance of new business conditions, new technologies and possible deployment solutions are the main reasons for non-productivity and poor business performance. To demonstrate the dynamics of appearance and popularity of terms, concepts, trends and technologies this paper offers a tabular overview of the frequencies based on the data from 3 global databases. Meta analysis shows the expected future development of analytical trends and technologies. This paper is intended for those who lead, run and participate in projects of implementation of large software systems, dealing with quality management of business, or want to understand the complexity of this area and the future directions of development