Life Cycle Assessment of Renewable Energy Alternatives for Replacement of Natural Gas in Building Material Industry

AbstractDue to environmental and geopolitical reasons, the need for substitution of fossil fuels with renewable alternatives in industry is augmenting. The main objective was to assess environmental impacts of “cradle-to-gate” brick production stages and to evaluate the effect of fuel substitution and variation of electricity mix on the impact. Scenarios with natural gas, bio-methane, first and second generation bio-fuels used as the fuels in industrial furnace were studied. Scenarios were analyzed using “ReCiPe” and “EcoIndicator’99” impact assessment methods. Results show that environmental impact can be reduced by circa 50% when natural gas is substituted with bio-methane or second generation bio-fuel

Technocracy and the market: world bank group technical assistance and the rise of neoliberalism

This thesis analyses the provision of technical assistance by the World Bank Group (the Group) from 1946 to 2010. Technical assistance concerns the transmission of knowledge and practices to encourage economic growth. Starting from the ontological position that “development” is merely a series of normative positions that change over time and that are dependent upon the worldview of the observer, it argues that Group technical assistance has helped to construct, project, and legitimise particular development “truths”. Drawing upon literature from within the discipline of International Political Economy, this analysis regards technical assistance as a form of power whereby exercising actors are able to persuade others and define structures in such a way as to make particular understandings appear as common sense. The use of “soft” technical assistance to build institutional and human resource capacity during the neoliberal era – built through policy reform, management selection, and personnel training – became a means to persuade recipients of the alleged legitimacy of market-led development. An institutional study, this work contextualises the growth and evolution of Group technical assistance in terms of crises in the world economy, shifting intellectual movements in academic and policy circles, and changes in the mission, organisational structure, and leadership of the Group. The Group is thus a shaper of and is shaped by the mainstream development discourse – the orthodox conceptualisation of the economic, political, social, and environmental “improvement” of developing countries. The thesis concludes that Group technical assistance has been able to reinforce particular “truths” through its allegedly scientific, objective, and value-neutral nature dissuading challenges to the prevailing orthodoxy. This thesis contributes to academic discussion by analysing the persuasive ability of Group technical assistance to convince recipients of the necessity of accepting and adopting particular development “truths” that are far from objective or value-neutral

Biomethane Supply Support Policy: System Dynamics Approach

AbstractSupport for renewable energy currently is revised in many countries due to the perception that the economic burden caused by the support exceeds the permissible limit. Decreased or suspended support creates instability in renewable energy production. There is a lack of research related to design of the sustainable renewable energy support policy, which considers the structure of the support policy system in detail leading to successful implementation of such support. The aim of the study was to create the model which helps to devise biomethane supply support policy providing controllable and stable growth of biomethane production over time avoiding relapsed “overshoots and oscillations” in the system. Due to the dynamic and complex character of energy supply system policy decisions, system dynamics was used as the method. The results show that the main parameters which have an impact on stability of the support policy are feedbacks linking the total biomethane support payments, the granted permits, the perceived limit of the support, willingness to invest in the production assets as well as time delays of the action resulting from the feedbacks. The results show that biomethane production can reach up to 610 GWh with the support of 66 EUR per MWh in 2030 without exceeding the perceived support limit and avoiding fluctuations in the system. The developed method-model can be used by the researchers and energy policy developers to study the dynamics of investments into biomethane supply systems and the resulting biomethane production volumes depending both on the sizes of the subsidies provided for the biomethane as well as the structure of the support system

The Role Of Hydrogen In Future Climate-neutral Economy

Global annual CO2 emissions have increased more than 16 times in 2021 compared to 1990 and are expected to keep growing. Renewable energy is a critical way to reduce the impact on the climate. However, renewable energy production’s power output does not necessarily match the demand. The intermittent character of renewable electricity generation requires the storage of produced energy. Green hydrogen production via electrolysis is an opportunity to increase the integration of renewable energy sources and move hard-to-decarbonize sectors to climate neutrality. This research aims to assess the potential role of hydrogen in decarbonizing the energy sector in Latvia in the long term. Latvia’s energy system is modeled using the input/output deterministic energy system analysis model EnergyPlan. The model includes all the primary energy demand sectors, energy production, and storage, and allows the analysis of the impact of different strategies on the total costs and emissions of the system by 2050. The results show that the production potential of green hydrogen will increase significantly by 2030, taking into account the existing plans for the installation of 800 MW of wind and solar generating capacity on a national scale. The most significant potential is associated with using hydrogen in the transport sector in vehicles and in producing alternative fuels. Other uses include the decarbonization of the natural gas sector. In these scenarios, it is possible to reduce CO2 emissions while annual system costs increase

Use of Synthetic Fuels Derived from Green Hydrogen and CO2 in Heavy-duty and Long-range Transport: the Case of Latvia

Decarbonization of the transport sector may be more challenging than it is for the power supply and heating sectors. Green hydrogen, i.e., produced from renewable energy sources, combined with CO2 captured from flue gases or air can be used to produce synthetic fuels, e.g., dimethyl ether (DME), ammonia, and jet fuel. These synthetic fuels can be used in heavy-duty and long-range transport, i.e., trucks, ships, and airplanes. The research question of this study is: how much green hydrogen and CO2 is needed to replace fossil fuel in the mentioned transport sectors with synthetic fuels? How much of the power demand for production of the synthetic fuels can be supplied from renewables, i.e., wind and solar power, considering the installed capacities of these technologies, and the excess power that can be used for the hydrolysis process. The case of Latvia for the year 2050 is used for the simulation of scenarios with various mixes of renewable power production. The simulation is done on an hourly basis for the whole year, using EnergyPLAN software as the modeling tool. The results show the total hydrogen and CO2 demand, the total power demand for hydrolysis of green hydrogen, and the share of the demand that can be covered by renewable power technologies. The results also include the costs of synthetic fuel supply for the considered transport sector. The results are obtained for scenarios of different combinations of installed capacities of wind power plants and solar PVs

The wolfensohn, wolfowitz, and zoellick presidencies: Revitalising the neoliberal agenda of the world bank

This article analyses the World Bank presidencies of James Wolfensohn (1995–2005), Paul Wolfowitz (2005–2007), and Robert Zoellick (2007–2012) to review how the World Bank spent more than a decade attempting to renew the legitimacy of its neoliberal agenda that was widely denounced following the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis. It is the argument here that between the Asian Crisis and the 2008 Global Financial Crisis (GFC), the World Bank turned away from an aggressive and coercively conditional neoliberal approach towards a flexible, collaborative, and comprehensive neoliberal approach. Observing the norm entrepreneurs of the World Bank Presidents and Chief Economists, the major contribution of this article is to reveal that the World Bank has attempted in recent years to renew the legitimacy of its developmental mindset, while maintaining a market-centric mentality. The conclusion reached by this article is that the World Bank evolved in rhetoric and practice between the Asian Crisis and the GFC to revitalise its widely condemned (yet stalwartly maintained) neoliberal discourse