Photovoltaic panels as a main component of energy sustainable communities : comparative energy analysis of a village under Swiss and South African climatic loads

Paper presented to the 3rd Southern African Solar Energy Conference, South Africa, 11-13 May, 2015.At the community level, it is difficult to rely on a single centralized energy technology when considering renewable energy and the use of a mix of multiple distributed energy systems (DES) seems advantageous. DES, e.g. photovoltaic panels (PV), are typically integrated at building level and account for a small fraction of required energy. Since energy supply from renewables is highly fluctuating over time and dependent on climatic and local conditions, a reliable integration is a challenging task. In this paper, we use a recently developed concept, that allows to sufficiently improve the energy efficiency of the building stock, to manage energy supply from renewables and to optimize the future energy system using the energy hub approach, while effectively integrating DES. Using the same village characteristics, we found that, due to mismatch of available solar potential and the electricity demand, 18% of available solar potential cannot be utilized in Zernez, while in Johannesburg, this mismatch amounts to 22%.cf201

Spatial carbon and price spillovers among EU countries on their pathway toward net-zero electricity supply

This paper introduces a methodology to assess and compare the carbon and price marginal impacts (also known as spillovers) of a country’s generation mix on other countries. The methodology is applied for possible decarbonization pathways from 2018 to 2030 and 2040 for EU countries, considering the foreseen expansion of generation and transmission capacities, as well as nuclear and fossil fuel phase-out. Firstly, the optimal hourly dispatch of power plants is computed. Secondly, the impact of each country on the overall European electricity system is analyzed by removing that respective country from the simulation. Thirdly, each country’s spillovers on prices and CO2 emissions are assessed. On the pathway to a net-zero CO2-emission energy system, the uncoordinated penetration of low-cost renewables among countries enables export opportunities to carbon-intensive electricity generation despite rising prices of EU CO2 allowances. The spillovers, resulting from those exports, cause in the importing country (i) the substitution of clean electricity with electricity stemming out of carbonintensive plants and (ii) a market price decrease. While the former lessens CO2-mitigation strategies, the latter results in a lack of investment in renewable generation due to market prices being insufficient to recover capital costs for new renewables. Redistributing CO2 revenues among countries could be a way to overcome the drawbacks due to spillovers.</p

Modelling the urban microclimate and its impact on the energy demand of buildings and building clusters

The urban microclimate (UMC) can strongly affect the building energy demand. In this paper, the impact of the UMC on the space heating and cooling energy demand of buildings is analysed for typical office buildings in street canyon configurations, using detailed building energy simulations (BES). Convective aspects of the UMC are modelled using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and data are transferred to BES, either by convective heat transfer coefficients or by directly coupling CFD and BES. Measured urban heat island intensities are additionally considered. Comparisons to stand-alone buildings show the large influence of the urban situation. We then outline multi-scale modelling concepts to consider UMC effects at larger urban scales, using a city energy simulation model and an adapted UMC model

Energy Hub Economic Dispatch by Symbiotic Organisms Search Algorithm

International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Applied Mathematics in Engineering (ICAIAME) -- APR 20-22, 2019 -- Antalya, TURKEYEnergy hub receives various energy carriers such as gas, electricity, and heat in its input and then converts them into required demands such as gas, cool, heat, compressed air, and electricity. The energy hub economic dispatch problem is a non-smooth, high-dimension, non-convex, and non-differential problem, it should be solved subject to equality and inequality constraints. In this study, symbiotic organisms search algorithm is carried out for energy hub economic dispatch problem to minimize the energy cost of the system. In an attempt to show the efficiency of the proposed algorithm, an energy hub system, which has 7 hubs and 17 energy production units, has been used. Simulation results of the symbiotic organisms search algorithm have been compared with some heuristic algorithms to show the ability of the proposed algorithm.WOS:0006787710000282-s2.0-8508342322