Jobs from Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency

According to research by Roger Bezdek for the American Solar Energy Society (ASES), the renewable energy (RE) and energy efficiency (EE) industries created a total of 8.5 million jobs (direct and indirect) in 2006; 450,000 jobs in RE and 8 million jobs in EE throughout the United States. As many as 1 out of 4 workers in the United States will be working in RE or EE industries by 2030. The 40 million jobs are not just engineering?related, but also include millions of new jobs in manufacturing, construction, accounting, and management.  

Energy-efficiency for MISO-OFDMA based user-relay assisted cellular networks

The concept of improving energy-efficiency (EE) without sacrificing the service quality has become important nowadays. The combination of orthogonal frequency-division multiple-access (OFDMA) multi-antenna transmission technology and relaying is one of the key technologies to deliver the promise of reliable and high-data-rate coverage in the most cost-effective manner. In this paper, EE is studied for the downlink multiple-input single-output (MISO)-OFDMA based user-relay assisted cellular networks. EE maximization is formulated for decode and forward (DF) relaying scheme with the consideration of both transmit and circuit power consumption as well as the data rate requirements for the mobile users. The quality of-service (QoS)-constrained EE maximization, which is defined for multi-carrier, multi-user, multi-relay and multi-antenna networks, is a non-convex and combinatorial problem so it is hard to tackle. To solve this difficult problem, a radio resource management (RRM) algorithm that solves the subcarrier allocation, mode selection and power allocation separately is proposed. The efficiency of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated by numerical results for different system parameter

Introducing Energy Efficiency into SQALE

Energy Efficiency is becoming a key factor in software development, given the sharp growth of IT systems and their impact on worldwide energy consumption. We do believe that a quality process infrastructure should be able to consider the Energy Efficiency of a system since its early development: for this reason we propose to introduce Energy Efficiency into the existing quality models. We selected the SQALE model and we tailored it inserting Energy Efficiency as a sub-characteristic of efficiency. We also propose a set of six source code specific requirements for the Java language starting from guidelines currently suggested in the literature. We experienced two major challenges: the identification of measurable, automatically detectable requirements, and the lack of empirical validation on the guidelines currently present in the literature and in the industrial state of the practice as well. We describe an experiment plan to validate the six requirements and evaluate the impact of their violation on Energy Efficiency, which has been partially proved by preliminary results on C code. Having Energy Efficiency in a quality model and well verified code requirements to measure it, will enable a quality process that precisely assesses and monitors the impact of software on energy consumptio

Monitoring of the “Energiewende” – energy efficiency indicators for Germany

The increasing number of energy and climate targets both at national and international level induces a rising demand for regular monitoring. In this paper, we analyse the possibilities and limits of using energy efficiency indicators as a tool for monitoring these targets. We refer to the energy efficiency targets of the German “Energiewende” and calculate and discuss several energy efficiency indicators for Germany both at the level of the overall economy and the main energy consumption sectors. We make use of the energy efficiency indicator toolbox that we have developed within the ODYSSEE database in recent years and find that there is still a considerable gap to close to achieve the overall energy efficiency targets in Germany by 2020. We also show that progress in energy efficiency slowed down between 2008 and 2012, i.e. compared to the base year of most of the German energy efficiency targets and find that energy efficiency progress in the industrial sector during the last decade has been especially slow. We conclude that improvements in energy efficiency have to speed up considerably in order to achieve the targets for 2020. Although the use of energy efficiency indicators is limited by data constraints and some methodological problems, these indicators give a deep insight into the factors determining energy consumption and can therefore complement the official monitoring process of the German “Energiewende” which only relies on highly aggregated indicators for energy efficiency

Aircraft energy efficiency. Overview

Six advanced technology development projects that could cut fuel consumption of future civil air transports by as much as 50 percent are highlighted. These include improved engine components; better engine design; thin short blades for turboprop aircaft; using composite primary structures for weight reduction; the use of supercritical wings, higher aspect ratio, and winglets for improved aerodynamics; active controls; and laminar flow control. The time span of each of the six efforts and NASA's expected expenditures are also discussed

Energy efficiency: annual report, 2003/2005

"This is the 13th Annual Report on energy efficiency activity in the education sector and covers the 2003/04 and 2004/05 financial years. The report comprises energy information from Education and Library Boards (ELBs), Voluntary Grammar Schools (VGS) and Grant Maintained Integrated (GMI) schools. Included in this report is an outline of each Board’s overall energy consumption and CO2 performance and, equally importantly, a general overview of their investment in energy efficient schemes and energy related initiatives within their area." - DENI website

California's Secret Energy Surplus: The Potential for Energy Efficiency

Assesses the achievable energy efficiency potential over the next ten years across California for all electricity customers using hundreds of commercially available measures