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Cities all around the world are faced with a rapid increase of urban population, and their crucial sustainable development issue becomes energy management. Moreover, the national energy management sector is slowly passing from government surveillance to the responsibility of local municipalities. The energy efficiency management in cities helps local governments to focus on important energy projects that have strong environmental aspects and financial feasibility. This paper analyzes the public lighting energy management in the Croatian city of Rijeka in order to determine the connection of the energy market liberalization and sustainable development in urban areas. Research results indicate a significant connection...
Biogas and bio-methane that are based on energy crops are renewable energy carriers and therefore potentially contribute to climate protection. However, significant greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions resulting from agricultural production processes must be considered. Among those, the production and use of fertilizer, and the resulting leaching of nitrous oxide (N2O), are crucial factors. This article provides an integrated life cycle assessment (LCA) of biogas (i.e. bio-methane that has been upgraded and injected into the natural gas grid), taking into account the processes of fermentation, upgrading and injection to the grid for two different types of biogas plants. The analysis is based on different feedstocks from...
Because of the inevitable depletion of fossil fuels and the corresponding release of carbon to the environment, the global energy future is complex. Some of the consequences may be politically and economically disruptive, and expensive to remedy. For the next several centuries, fuel requirements will increase with population, land use, and ecosystem degradation. Current or projected levels of aggregated energy resource use will not sustain civilization as we know it beyond a few more generations. At the same time, issues of energy security, reliability, sustainability, recoverability, and safety need attention. We supply a top-down, qualitative model—the surety model—to balance expenditures of limited resources...
Regional systems, increased competition, and environmental imperatives are forcing a reallocation of state and federal regulatory responsibilities for the US electric power sector. The great extent of regional diversity in the sector raises a policy relevant empirical question. Is this diversity due to choice or circumstance? This paper finds circumstance to be a more significant determinant of fundamental performance than choice, but also finds evidence that decisions at the margin reflect the diverse preferences of regional policies. This suggests a continued role for (more responsive) state level regulation in order to satisfy diverse preferences. Uncertainty about the optimal endpoint of restructuring reinforces...
The Southern Appalachian forest region of the U.S.-a region responsible for 23% of U.S. coal production-has 24 billion metric tons of high quality coal remaining of which mountaintop coal mining (MCM) will be the primary extraction method. Here we consider greenhouse gas emissions associated with MCM terrestrial disturbance in the life-cycle of coal energy production. We estimate disturbed forest carbon, including terrestrial soil and nonsoil carbon using published U.S. Environmental Protection Agency data of the forest floor removed and U.S. Department of Agriculture - Forest Service inventory data. We estimate the amount of previously buried geogenic organic carbon brought to the soil surface during MCM using...
The aim of the Lifestyle project is to analyse the CO 2 emission reduction potential of lifestyle change. The analysis is carried out by examining the direct and the indirect energy contents of the average Dutch household consumption. An overview of the past developments of Dutch sector energy intensities is produced and its consequences for the average household energy requirement are studied. Also differences in energy requirement related to differences in lifestyle are assessed. Calculations of the Dutch household expenditure survey has resulted in an overview of the energy requirement per income and spending subcategory. The correlations between some relevant household factors are determined and discussed.
Addressing energy poverty rather than energy equity conveniently evades the problem of the gap in energy consumption per capita in the developed and developing world. For energy security policies to adequately address energy poverty it requires a widening of scope from national to global. This is a comment to the forthcoming presentation of IEA's proposition for a new architecture for financing universal modern energy access to be presented at the conference ‘Energy for all—Financing access for the poor’ held in Oslo in October 2011.
This paper analyzes the determinants and barriers of energy conservation investment behaviour. A number of barriers were found in a literature survey. A three-phase investment model on the micro level was constructed. Hypotheses derived from the model were empirically tested by analyzing a survey of more than 300 Dutch Firms. Economic variables seem to determine investment behaviour to a large extent.
Eight major industrial processes areresponsible for over 50% of industrial energy consumption in most countries. The energy efficiency of these processes was determined in a number of countries, with appropriate corrections for structural differences between countries. It is shown that considerable differences occur between countries, but that manufacturing industry in Eastern Europe in general is less efficient than in EU countries. In all cases efficiency is worse than what is technically and economically feasible. International comparisons provide information on energy efficiency differences, insight into technological differences between countries and into costs requirements for efficiency improvements. The...
This paper deals with the methodologies and databases for comparative assessment of emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) from the full energy chain (FENCH) of different energy sources. It largely refers to an international experts workshop on the topic held in October 1994 in Beijing, which was the first meeting in a series of IAEA expert meetings on comparison of FENCH-GHG emission from energy sources. The findings and recommendations of the workship cover topics such as time horizon, plant life time, materials flows and system output comparability.
This paper describes the potential applications of renewable energy sources to replace fossil fuel combustion as the prime energy sources in various countries, and discusses problems associated with biomass combustion in boiler power systems. Here, the term biomass includes organic matter produced as a result of photosynthesis as well as municipal, industrial and animal waste material. Brief summaries of the basic concepts involved in the combustion of biomass fuels are presented. Renewable energy sources (RES) supply 14% of the total world energy demand. RES are biomass, hydropower, geothermal, solar, wind and marine energies. The renewables are the primary, domestic and clean or inexhaustible energy resources....
During the last years, the preservation of the atmospheric environment has played an increasingly important role in society. The Diesel engine can be considered an environmentally friendly engine because of its low consumption and the subsequent carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions reduction. However, in the near future it will face strong restrictive emission standards, which demand that the current nitrogen oxides (NOx) and soot emissions are halved. To comply with these restrictions new combustion concepts are emerging, such as PCCI (premixed charge compression ignition), in which the fuel burns in premixed conditions. Combustion noise is thus deteriorated and consequently end-users could be reluctant to drive vehicles...
The major part of the Netherlands consists of a low-lying river delta which is very sensitive to hydrological conditions in the North-Western part of the European continent. The rivers Rhine, Meuse and Scheldt carry through this delta to the North Sea annually nearly 100 km3 of fresh water. This water originates from a drainage basin of about 185 000 km2, which is 6 times the country area. The present geography of the Netherlands has largely been shaped by this river inflow and by the sediments which are carried along. Interaction of these fluxes with North Sea hydrodynamics in a period of rising sea level has produced large lowlands, which in the past millennium have been reclaimed for agricultural, urban and industrial...
The U.S. Department of Energy's Hanford Site was established in southeastern Washington during the 1940s to produce plutonium, and the Pantex plant in Texas (used to load conventional ammunition shells and bombs) was rehabilitated in the 1950s to assemble nuclear weapons using the plutonium produced at Hanford. Current concentrations of airborne radionuclides around the perimeters of both sites are below applicable guidelines. Concentrations of radionuclides and nonradiological water quality in the Columbia River at Hanford and radiological and nonradiological water quality in the Ogallala Aquifer beneath the Pantex plant are also in compliance with applicable standards. Foodstuffs irrigated with river water downstream...
Because of the inevitable depletion of fossil fuels and the corresponding release of carbon to the environment, the global energy future is complex. Some of the consequences may be politically and economically disruptive, and expensive to remedy. For the next several centuries, fuel requirements will increase with population, land use, and ecosystem degradation. Current or projected levels of aggregated energy resource use will not sustain civilization as we know it beyond a few more generations. At the same time, issues of energy security, reliability, sustainability, recoverability, and safety need attention. We supply a top-down, qualitative model—the surety model—to balance expenditures of limited resources...
The direct and indirect consumption is responsible for more than half the anthropogenic emission of greenhouse gases, especially. It might well be that within 50 - 100 years countries like The Netherlands should reduce their CO2 emission with 80% or more. In principle many options can be developed and applied to reduce the CO2 emission. Focused on The Netherlands, the following ones are investigated within the Dutch National Research Programme on Global Air Pollution and Climate Change, phase I: energy efficiency improvement; material efficiency improvement and waste management; a shift to renewable energy sources, especially biomass; and decarbonization of fuels and flue gases. The reduce GHG emissions from The...
Noise exposure is known to cause hearing loss and a variety of disturbances, such as annoyance, hypertension and loss of sleep. It is generally accepted that these situations are caused by the acoustical events processed by the auditory system. However, there are acoustical events that are not necessarily processed by the auditory system, but that nevertheless cause harm. Infrasound and low frequency noise (ILFN, <500Hz) are acoustical phenomena that can impact the human body causing irreversible organic damage to the organism, but that do not cause classical hearing impairment. Acoustical environments are normally composed of all types of acoustical events: those that are processed by the auditory system, and those...
Plastics have now become indispensable materials in the modern world and application in the industrial field is continually increasing. The properties of the oil derived from waste plastics were analyzed and found that it has properties similar to that of diesel. Waste plastic oil (WPO) was tested as a fuel in a D.I. diesel engine and its performance characteristics were analysed and compared with diesel fuel (DF) operation. It is observed that the engine could operate with 100% waste plastic oil and can be used as fuel in diesel engines. Oxides of nitrogen (NOx) was higher by about 25% and carbon monoxide (CO) increased by 5% for waste plastic oil operation compared to diesel fuel (DF) operation. Hydrocarbon was...
The recent failure of Copenhagen negotiations shows that concrete actions are needed to create the conditions for a consensus over global emission reduction policies. A wide coalition of countries in international climate change agreements could be facilitated by the perceived fairness of rich and poor countries of the abatement sharing at international level. In this paper I use two popular climate change integrated assessment models to investigate the path and decompose components and sources of future inequality in the emissions distribution. Results prove to be consistent with previous empirical studies and robust to model comparison and show that gaps in GDP across world regions will still play a crucial role...