Hydropower in Brazil through the lens of the water-energy nexus

Brazil’s high historical dependency on hydroelectricity, coupled with recent severe droughts in the Southeast and the Northeast, has unveiled water availability issues that affect the electricity sector. The relationship of water and energy and its importance is recognised in literature, but there is still scope for advancements regarding methods for the link between resources. By using the Water-Energy Nexus concept, this study suggests a model calculating evaporation and water consumption of hydropower, as well as performing a water budget analysis for individual reservoirs, states, and regions for the Brazil case study. The analysis is performed for 163 reservoirs for the time periods 2010-2016 and 2015-2049. The model was designed to overcome spatial and temporal issues that inhibit water models to be meaningfully linked to energy models. The time step for evaporation and water consumption is hourly, and daily for the water budget analysis, while political spatial boundaries are used, along with hydrological boundaries for estimating future projections of river flows. Detailed future climatic scenarios for the reservoirs were created to perform a future scenario analysis of the main hydropower system of Brazil. For every 1°C future increase in temperature, the average annual evaporation increase will be around 90mm. Seasonality is important since evaporation varies (69-151mm per month). Water footprint values increase in the future, reaching a high of 147-201 m3/MWh in the North. While, reservoir levels can periodically drop enough in the 2015-2049 timeframe, that electricity production will be impossible to even 30% of particular months in the Southeast and 35% in the Northeast. Furthermore, water availability through the use of capacity factors is proposed as a link with energy models, and an example is presented. Finally, results are discussed in order to offer insight regarding policy implications for the future of hydropower in Brazil and elsewhere

The Nexus: Estimation of Water Consumption for Hydropower in Brazil

Recent major droughts in Brazil have given rise to discussions about water availability and security in relation to energy production. The relationship of the two resources, the water-energy nexus, is recognised as being of importance in literature and metrics for its estimation and understanding are sought after. One important aspect in understanding the water-energy nexus of hydroelectricity is estimating its water consumption and also its water footprint. In order to do this, this study uses a modified Penman-Monteith method to estimate evaporation from Brazil’s reservoirs for the period 2010-2016 and subsequently calculates the water footprint of hydroelectricity reservoirs. The results show the evaporation variation in space and time in the reservoirs and the differences of water consumed per unit of energy in Brazil. The discussion provides insight as to how the results can be valuable for future management and planning purposes

Creation of virtual worlds from 3D models retrieved from content aware networks based on sketch and image queries

The recent emergence of user generated content requires new content creation tools that will be both easy to learn and easy to use. These new tools should enable the user to construct new high-quality content with minimum effort; it is essential to allow existing multimedia content to be reused as building blocks when creating new content. In this work we present a new tool for automatically constructing virtual worlds with minimum user intervention. Users can create these worlds by drawing a simple sketch, or by using interactively segmented 2D objects from larger images. The system receives as a query the sketch or the segmented image, and uses it to find similar 3D models that are stored in a Content Centric Network. The user selects a suitable model from the retrieved models, and the system uses it to automatically construct a virtual 3D world

Real-Time Signal Acquisition, High Speed Processing and Frequency Analysis in Modern Air Data Measurement Instruments

Non

Signatures for Solar Axions/WISPs

Standard solar physics cannot account for the X-ray emission and other puzzles, the most striking example being the solar corona mystery. The corona temperature rise above the non-flaring magnetized sunspots, while the photosphere just underneath becomes cooler, makes this mystery more intriguing. The paradoxical Sun is suggestive of some sort of exotic solution, axions being the (only?) choice for the missing ingredient. We present atypical axion signatures, which depict solar axions with a rest mass max ~17 meV/c2. Then, the Sun has been for decades the overlooked harbinger of new particle physics.Comment: To appear in the proceedings of the 6th Patras Workshop, Zurich 5-9 July 201

CAST constraints on the axion-electron coupling

In non-hadronic axion models, which have a tree-level axion-electron interaction, the Sun produces a strong axion flux by bremsstrahlung, Compton scattering, and axiorecombination, the "BCA processes." Based on a new calculation of this flux, including for the first time axio-recombination, we derive limits on the axion-electron Yukawa coupling gae and axion-photon interaction strength ga using the CAST phase-I data (vacuum phase). For ma <~ 10 meV/c2 we find ga gae < 8.1 × 10−23 GeV−1 at 95% CL. We stress that a next-generation axion helioscope such as the proposed IAXO could push this sensitivity into a range beyond stellar energy-loss limits and test the hypothesis that white-dwarf cooling is dominated by axion emission

First results of the CAST-RADES haloscope search for axions at 34.67 μeV

We present results of the Relic Axion Dark-Matter Exploratory Setup (RADES), a detector which is part of the CERN Axion Solar Telescope (CAST), searching for axion dark matter in the 34.67μeV mass range. A radio frequency cavity consisting of 5 sub-cavities coupled by inductive irises took physics data inside the CAST dipole magnet for the first time using this filter-like haloscope geometry. An exclusion limit with a 95% credibility level on the axion-photon coupling constant of gaγ & 4 × 10−13 GeV−1 over a mass range of 34.6738μeV < ma < 34.6771μeV is set. This constitutes a significant improvement over the current strongest limit set by CAST at this mass and is at the same time one of the most sensitive direct searches for an axion dark matter candidate above the mass of 25μeV. The results also demonstrate the feasibility of exploring a wider mass range around the value probed by CAST-RADES in this work using similar coherent resonant cavitiesWe wish to thank our colleagues at CERN, in particular Marc Thiebert from the coating lab, as well as the whole team of the CERN Central Cryogenic Laboratory for their support and advice in speci c aspects of the project. We thank Arefe Abghari for her contributions as the project's summer student during 2018. This work has been funded by the Spanish Agencia Estatal de Investigacion (AEI) and Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional (FEDER) under project FPA-2016-76978-C3-2-P and PID2019-108122GB-C33, and was supported by the CERN Doctoral Studentship programme. The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council and BD, JG and SAC acknowledge support through the European Research Council under grant ERC-2018-StG-802836 (AxScale project). BD also acknowledges fruitful discussions at MIAPP supported by DFG under EXC-2094 { 390783311. IGI acknowledges also support from the European Research Council (ERC) under grant ERC-2017-AdG-788781 (IAXO+ project). JR has been supported by the Ramon y Cajal Fellowship 2012-10597, the grant PGC2018-095328-B-I00(FEDER/Agencia estatal de investigaci on) and FSE-GA2017-2019-E12/7R (Gobierno de Aragón/FEDER) (MINECO/FEDER), the EU through the ITN \Elusives" H2020-MSCA-ITN-2015/674896 and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft under grant SFB-1258 as a Mercator Fellow. CPG was supported by PROMETEO II/2014/050 of Generalitat Valenciana, FPA2014-57816-P of MINECO and by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreements 690575 and 674896. AM is supported by the European Research Council under Grant No. 742104. Part of this work was performed under the auspices of the US Department of Energy by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under Contract No. DE-AC52-07NA27344

Circular economy : from panacea for sustainability to conceptual and resource realities

Although the circular economy has increasingly been informing policies, it is far from ideal, and it could be argued that if the right measures are not taken, we will compromise overall sustainability. The definitions for what a circular economy entails are vague, which also translates into the performance metrics used. The close relationship of a circular economy with decoupling from Gross Domestic Product is another grey area. It is well documented that natural limitations (entropy) need to be considered, but another important aspect is that when assessing the circularity of a product/material and its recyclability, all resources used to achieve this need to be considered, as well as imports and exports of these products/materials. The social aspect of circularity needs to be strengthened as well, since "job creation" is not enough. A possible way forward would be to take lessons from other concepts like the Resource Nexus and Degrowth. In its current form, a circular economy is not even theoretically possible

The water-energy nexus of Brazil's hydropower

This chapter assesses the water use of hydropower in Brazil, shedding light on the scale of the water cycle and the resilience of hydropower under accelerating climate change conditions. Recent droughts unveiled increasing risks and highlighted a lack of methodological approaches and well-defined metrics. We present a novel detailed spatiotemporal scenario analysis of evaporation and the water footprint for the period 2015-2049. Our model predicts an evaporation increase of ~90▒mm, assuming temperature increases by just 1 °C, and we expect increases in water footprint values. These impacts are strongest in Brazil's Northeast, putting this region at highest risk for energy resilience in the future. We conclude on a need for stricter and more comprehensive water impact assessments for future hydroelectricity plans. Our analysis calls for an overhaul of the electricity system of Brazil, with more integration across regions, upscaling wind and solar, and broader Factor X strategies as sustainable pathways for Brazil