Renewable and sustainable energy challenges to face for the achievement of Sustainable Development Goals

This paper is the editorial for the virtual special issue (VSI) of Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews (RSER) dedicated to 4 SDEWES Conferences held in 2020, namely: (i) the 2nd Latin American Conference on Sustainable Development of Energy, Water and Environment Systems (LASDEWES 2020) held from February 9 to 12, 2020 in Buenos Aires, Argentina; (ii) the 1st Asia Pacific Conference on Sustainable Development of Energy, Water and Environment Systems (APSDEWES 2020) held from April 6 to 9, 2020 in Gold Coast, Australia; (iii) the 4th South East European Conference on Sustainable Development of Energy, Water and Environment Systems (SEESDEWES 2020) held from June 28, 2020 to July 2, 2020 in Sarajevo, Bosnia Herzegovina, and (iv) 15th Conference on Sustainable Development of Energy, Water and Environment Systems (SDEWES 2020) held from September 1 to 5, 2020 in Cologne, Germany. The VSI collected both high quality review papers and original research articles presented at the 4 SDEWES conferences in 2020 belonging to the aims and scope of RSER. After a scrutinizing peer review process, 20 articles were accepted and published. These articles fall into four main areas: renewable energy cutting edge technologies, energy storage, energy modelling techniques and, climate and energy policy and impacts. Cross-areas articles belong to this Special Issue covering almost all the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

Techniques and technologies to board on the feasible renewable and sustainable energy systems

This paper is the editorial for the virtual special issue (VSI) of Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews (RSER) dedicated to the 16th Conference on Sustainable Development of Energy, Water and Environment Systems (SDEWES 2021) held from October 10 to 15, 2021 in Dubrovnik, Croatia. The VSI collected both high quality review papers and original research articles presented at the SDEWES Conference in 2021 belonging to the aims and scope of RSER. After a scrutinizing peer review process, 28 articles were accepted and published. These articles deal with techniques and technologies to board on the feasible Renewable and Sustainable Energy Systems. Many of them are multidisciplinary articles addressing almost all the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and providing feasible solutions to the strongly needed decarbonization pathways

Smart municipal energy grid within electricity market

A smart municipal energy grid including electricity and heat production infrastructure and electricity demand response has been modeled in HOMER case study with the aim of decreasing total yearly community energy costs. The optimal configurations of used technologies (photovoltaic plants, combined heat and power plants, wind power plants) and sizing, with minimal costs, are presented and compared using three scenarios of average electricity market price 3.5 c€/kWh, 5 c€/kWh and 10 c€/kWh. Smart municipal energy grids will have an important role in future electricity markets, due to their flexibility to utilize excess electricity production from CHP and variable renewable energy sources through heat storage. This flexibility enables the levelized costs of energy within smart municipal energy grids to decrease below electricity market prices even in case of fuel price disturbances. With initial costs in the range 0- 3,931,882 €, it has been shown that economical and environmental benefits of smart municipal energy grids are: the internal rate of return in the range 6.87-15.3%, and CO2 emissions in the range from -4,885,203 to 5,165,780 kg/year. The resulting realistic number of hours of operation of combined heat and power plants obtained by simulations is in the range 2,410- 7,849 hours/year.This is the peer-reviewed version of the article: Batas-Bjelic, I., Rajakovic, N., Duic, N., 2017. Smart municipal energy grid within electricity market. Energy 137, 1277–1285. [https://doi.org/10.1016/j.energy.2017.06.177