Energy and environmental performance of a heat pump in different power grid scenarios

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A review on microcogeneration national testing procedures

Abstract Several standard testing procedures were prepared or are in a developing phase in many countries, to provide methods for determining the performance of MCHP (Micro Combined Heat and Power) systems. This is due to the quick diffusion of microcogenerators worldwide, especially in the Japanese, European and North American markets, and to existing supporting mechanisms, that require the achievement of specific minimum energy performance. In the framework of Subtask B of Annex 54 of International Energy Agency, information about national standard testing procedures were gathered. In this paper, the main available national standards are summarized, and a comparison is performed

Expanded Total Equivalent Warming Impact analysis on experimental standalone fresh-food refrigerator

The stand-alone refrigerators for fresh food storage represent a large part of supermarket refrigeration equip-ment. In these devices, the usage of refrigerants with low Global Warming Potential allows the mitigation of the direct emissions due to refrigerant leakages. In contrast, the indirect emissions in these components are highly dependent on the refrigerant charge, leakage, and equivalent emission factors related to the electricity pro-duction mix. The most used index to evaluate the environmental impact of refrigerators is the Total Equivalent Warming Impact. Despite that this index presents limits on the fixed evaluation of many parameters such as refrigerant charge, electricity consumption and, electricity emission factor. Otherwise in this study, an accurate evaluation of refrigerators emissions has been realised by using the innovative Expanded Total Equivalent Warming Impact method to an experimental stand-alone refrigerator by using a dynamic approach to evaluate direct and indirect contributions. The environmental analysis considers four different refrigerants and four different countries of location. The results show that the indirect emissions due to electricity consumption cover the highest share of emissions. In addition, the operating years affected by low refrigerant charges are respon-sible for emissions by greater than 25% compared to other ones. The hourly equivalent emissions due to elec-tricity consumption in countries characterized by an electricity generation mix mainly based on renewable and/ or nuclear plants show an indirect environmental impact up to 5 times lower than countries with a natural gas -based electricity production mix. The study also defines new strategies to reduce the environmental impact of the stand-alone refrigerator such as the use of photovoltaic systems combined with this technology or earlier maintenance processes that could determine an equivalent emission saving of up to 38%

From smart energy community to smart energy municipalities: Literature review, agendas and pathways

The current energy and environmental target is the completely integration of the energy produced from different sources taking into account the renewables. The traditional power grids or thermal-cooling and heating conversion systems converge to the use of smart grids and to the planning of intelligent local organizations through energy integration techniques. This cannot be assessed as an isolated problem but an integrated one. The right construction of smart society is to match different challenges achieving sustainable energy systems not only from the point of view of energy consumption in different sectors (civil, industrial, agriculture, transport) and of the related of pollutants emissions, but considering simultaneously the relation with the socio-economic impact. The aim of this paper is firstly to examine the theories-approach to smart energy systems at the community level, the scientific literature of the smart energy community, the benefits of their potential applications in the smart energy municipalities. Finally, it manages the aspects related to smart energy community adoption with a multidisciplinary approach linking the technical conditions to the socio-economic systems of territorial planning. The main finding is that the concept of the intelligent energy community is strictly related to a coherent and intersectoral approach searching the best control strategy to satisfy all energy requirements. Moreover, the road leading to the smart energy community is essential to build the more sustainable renewable energy systems, to collect storage synergies between energy sub-sectors through the energy sharing and finally to exploit economically efficient sources