ZELab: planning a living lab to educate modern engineering professionals

Buildings are now complex systems that traditionally have been studied in an isolated mode, seeking to respond to a specific need and dealing with a restricted set of variables. The targets established for energy efficient buildings and energy sustainability imply that these new systems are now more comprehensive and combine various independent systems. This new topology requires a new kind of engineering professionals trained in a more integrative and collaborative way. These new engineering professionals need to have not only expertise in a specific area, but also more comprehensive proficiencies that allow them to understand how to integrate their particular project into a wider functional system, and to communicate with experts from different areas. This paper addresses some challenges and issues posed to Higher Education institutions on the educational paradigms of future engineering professionals and proposes the ZELab teaching / research space as an integrative educational tool.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Sustainable development in higher education: Different teaching & learning approaches

Linking the economic, social and environmental aspects of any plan, project or activity is fundamental to act according to the sustainable development goals. These three dimensions are interrelated and interconnected in such a way that it is sometimes very hard to discriminate what their individual effects are, or on the contrary, how their joint effects are synergistic. And if this is generically a difficult task, when it comes to education the difficulty becomes even more significant, as one must be very careful defining concepts in an absolutely clear and undoubtful way. While the specialization is required to educate professionals able to accurately project and build these projects, it is now mandatory that everyone is also able to understand the causes and effects of their actions, towards sustainable development. In this Track, different teaching & learning approaches have been presented and discussed, aiming to use Higher Education as a highway to educate the professionals of the near future as strategic partners for the development of different mindsets, able to tackle the real problems.This work was financially supported by project UID/EQU/00511/2019 – Laboratory for Process Engineering, Environment, Biotechnology and Energy – LEPABE and by project UID/EQU/04730/2019 – Center for Innovation in Engineering and Industrial Technology, both funded by national funds through FCT/MCTES (PIDDAC).info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Indicators Used in the Energy Sector

World energy mix still depends heavily on fossil fuels but the foreseen increase demand, the scarcity of those resources, their unevenly distribution as well as other factors such as economic burdens due to fossil fuel prices and climate change concerns contributed to the establishment and implementation of new policies in the energy sector. Renewable energy sources are being promoted worldwide as a pathway to reduce external energy dependency, moving towards lower carbon energy systems. It is important to policy makers, investors and other stakeholders to have tools for deciding which policies, investments and measures should be implemented in the future. Thus indicators play very important role for fulfilling that task. This work present a structured presentation of several indicators commonly used to compare solutions in the energy domain

Macro Modelling of Electricity Price Towards Sdg7

Energy challenges are crucial issues to achieve Sustainable Development and its goals. Energy availability and affordability are pillars for ending poverty, giving access to commodities as well as water, etc. Modern lives rely on appliances and gadgets based on electric energy being its price a key issue making it worth to analyze and promote simple models able to predict electric energy prices to support in decision-making processes and in management. This work studied the correlation of electricity price with variables such as the electricity mix , GDP, energy productivity, electricity consumption per capita, fossil fuel reserves, and diesel price, using Spearman correlation. To the significant correlations found it was then applied the Kruskal-Wallis test and the variables that presented statistically significant differences were then considered to model electricity price based on these macro variables. Our findings revealed that the best models were a logarithmic and a linear model of energy productivity to predict electricity price. In the validation process, these models presented an average deviation of 10.3% and 11.7%, respectively, which is reasonable considering the simplicity of the models developed.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Macro modeling of electricity price towards SDG7

Energy challenges are crucial issues to achieve Sustainable Development and its goals. Energy availability and affordability are pillars for ending poverty, giving access to commodities as well as water, etc. Modern lives rely on appliances and gadgets based on electric energy being its price a key issue making it worth to analyze and promote simple models able to predict electric energy prices to support in decision-making processes and in management. This work studied the correlation of electricity price with variables such as the electricity mix, GDP (gross domestic product), energy productivity, electricity consumption per capita, fossil fuel reserves, and diesel price, using Spearman correlation. To the significant correlations found it was then applied the Kruskal–Wallis test and the variables that presented statistically significant differences were then considered to model electricity price based on these macro variables. Our findings revealed that the best models were a logarithmic and a linear model of energy productivity to predict electricity price, which is fundamental to achieve Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), specifically SDG7. In the validation process, these models presented an average deviation of 10.3% and 11.7%, respectively, which is reasonable considering the simplicity of the models developed.This work was financially supported by Base Funding – UIDB/04730/2020 of Center for Innovation in Engineering and Industrial Technology, CIETI – funded by national funds through the FCT/MCTES (PIDDAC), Portugal.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Renewable Energy Support Mechanisms – Present Status

Renewable energy production is important to solve problems related to security of supply, economic competitiveness, reduction of the economic energy burden to citizens and environmental impacts such as CO2 emissions and pollution. Besides this the scenarios for the future foresee an increase in energy demand mainly due emerging economies and by this reason all the above mentioned issues will be crucial for EU Member States and many other countries around the world. Due to the inability of market to move to more sustainable energy systems, using a higher share of energy from renewable energy sources, it was necessary public action, creating RES support mechanisms in the majority of countries.N/

Fossil fuel energy consumption in European countries

Traditionally fossil fuels have been use as the main resource to obtain energy but its use has several negative impacts, such as global warming and air pollution. Global warming has been mentioned has a key challenge to be addressed due to its expected grave consequences. Air pollution is another important problem and has been responsible for many health problems causing social and economic negative effects. However the use of fossil fuels has another strategic dimension when a sustainability perspective is considered, namely the preservation of natural resources, which is a goal of Circular Economy strategy. In this work fossil fuel energy consumption is analyzed in European countries as well as its relationship with other variables such as energy dependence and share of renewable energy in gross final energy consumption. It was possible to conclude that many European countries still depend heavily on fossil fuels.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Macro Modelling of Electricity Price Towards SDG7

ICEER2021 – the 8th International Conference on Energy and Environment ResearchEnergy is a very important issue to achieve Sustainable Development. Energy availability and affordability are key aspects for ending poverty and giving access to base commodities. In addition our daily lifes rely on electric appliances and gadgets to perform inumerous tasks so electricity price is a crucial issue due to its economic, environmental and social impacts. In this work it was studied the correlation of electricity price with the electricity mix from the several sources, GDP, energy productivity, electricity consumption per capita, fossil fuel reserves, and diesel price using Spearman correlation. The Kruskal-Wallis test was then applied considering the significant correlations and the macro variables that presented statistically significant differences were used to model electricity price. The logarithmic and linear model based on energy productivity to predict electricity price were the best models. The models were applied to the data and the average deviation was 10.3% and 11.7% which is satisfactory. Millions of people in the World are affected by electricity price and it is important to have models to predict electricity price to help in the decision-making process and in management.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

RES Efficiency Indicators for Portugal, Slovakia and Czech Republic

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Ground-source energy systems for building heating and cooling — A case study

6th International Conference on Energy and Environment ResearchThe growing concern about decarbonization of the energy production system led to the use of Renewable Energy Sources (RES). However, RES has the drawback of being inherently intermittent and lack controllability, placing limitations on their use. To avoid such limitations, the exploitation of a wide range of energy storage strategies that allow the balancing of energy production and demand is needed. One possibility is to use (BTES). This paper explores the use of BTES in a warehouse in Norway. The system presented in this Borehole Thermal Energy Storage study consists in hybridization of several technologies: PV-T solar panels, air, heat pumps and 8 geothermal wells.Authors thank the financial support of the project UID/EQU/00305/2013 – Center for Innovation in Engineering and Industrial Technology – CIETI, Portugal. This work was financially supported by project UID/EQU/00511/2019 – Laboratory for Process Engineering, Environment, Biotechnology and Energy – LEPABE funded by national funds through FCT/MCTES (PIDDAC), Portugal and Project LEPABE-2-ECO-INNOVATION, Portugal”– NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000005, funded by Norte Portugal Regional Operational Programme (NORTE 2020), under PORTUGAL 2020 Partnership Agreement, through the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), Portugal .info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio