Search results for " energy industry"
showing 10 items of 14 documents
Climate Change and Energy Issues in the North
2011
Highly industrialized societies are mostly responsible for the emerging anthropogenic climate change. There are different ways to measure this responsibility (e.g., whether based on causal contribution or strict responsibility, see Muller et al. 2007). However, regardless of the specific method applied to measure the impact, presently, the USA and the EU are the global leaders in green house gas emissions with countries such as China, India and Brazil following closely behind. Globally, GHG emissions are still increasing among the highly industrialized countries, particularly in the USA – a country that never ratified the Kyoto Protocol. However, the EU has managed to curb its emissions, co…
Embodied energy and environmental impacts of a biomass boiler: a life cycle approach
2015
The 2030 policy framework for climate and energy, proposed by the European Commission, aims towards the reduction of European greenhouse gas emissions by 40% in comparison to the 1990 level and to increase the share of renewable energy of at least the 27% of the European's energy consumption of 2030. The use of biomass as sustainable and renewable energy source may be a viable tool for achieving the above goals. However, renewable energy technologies are not totally clean because they cause energy and environmental impacts during their life cycle, and in particular they are responsible of air pollutant emissions. In this context, the paper assesses the energy and environmental impacts of a …
LNG cold energy use in agro-food industry: A case study in Sicily
2011
Abstract It is known how the complete gasification of liquefied natural gas (LNG) can return about 230 kWh/t of energy. Nevertheless out of fifty-one gasification plants in the world, only thirty-one of them are equipped with systems for the partial recovery of the available energy. At the moment most of these plants mainly produce electric energy; however the employment of the cold energy results very interesting, in fact, it can be recovered for agro-food transformation and conservation as well as for some loops in the cold chain. Cold energy at low temperatures requires high amounts of mechanical energy and it unavoidably increases as the required temperature diminishes. Cold energy reco…
The Energy System of Sicilian Region, Italy: 2014 situation and evolutionary trends
2015
The development of reliable energy scenarios are become increasingly more important and crucial due to scientific interest but also because it is essential for the deployment of effective energy policies in the territory. The depletion of Fossil Fuels and the need for the most industrialized countries to achieve the target of a sustainable development have induced important national, European and global initiatives. These actions have led to major changes on each energy system of countries and regions, contributing to the evolution of new local energy systems. In this paper, the Authors have collected, processed and analyzed the data concerning the evolution and changes of the Sicilian ener…
The importance of reliable climatic data in the energy evaluation
2012
Abstract In the last few years, more and more attention has been focused on energy issues, as it is pointed out, for example, by the Directive 2002/91/EC on the Energy Performance of Buildings and Directive 2009/28/EC on the promotion of the use of energy from renewable sources. However, in order to do that, reliable tools for technicians to design systems for such topics should be provided. Nowadays, several software are available; the weak point is the availability of reliable climatic data and, above all, the ones referring to solar radiation. In this work, after a short overview of the world climatic databases, a description of three statistical methods for the elaboration of a climatic…
Eletric vehicles impact using renewable energy
2015
In this moment, the principle topics for the modern world are the reduction of environmental pollution and the production of energy from renewable sources (for example photovoltaic system, wind farm, hydroelectric plants, etc.). This particular attention is determined by different reasons, in particular from the Kyoto Protocol, and from different problems as greenhouse effect, acid rain and climate change. The scope of this work is to study, for different years (1997-2013) in Italy, the production of electric energy from renewable and non-renewable. At a later stage, the attention will be on the consumption of the electric energy divided for different sectors. In particular, we study the po…
Project finance in the energy industry: new debt-based financing models
2012
The paper aims to examine the development of new financing models for project finance to attract private investors to finance large European energy infrastructure projects. In particular, the paper investigates the uniqueness of the project finance as a rapidly growing field in finance, the financial characteristics of the project bond market as one of the vehicles for funding energy projects, and the role of the credit support provided by the European Investment Bank and the European Union to promote the bond-based financing schemes. The paper is organized as follows. Section 1 provides a general description of project finance. Section 2 identifies the economic reasons for using project fi…
Supporting the Sustainable Energy Transition in the Canary Islands: Simulation and Optimization of Multiple Energy System Layouts and Economic Scenar…
2021
The Canary Islands have great potential for the implementation of sustainable energy systems due to its availability of natural resources. The archipelago is not connected to the mainland electricity grid and the current generation system is mainly based on traditional fossil fuel. Therefore, the islands strongly dependent on fuel importations, with high costs due to logistics. Furthermore, due to the inadequate coverage of residential heating and cooling needs, the per capita energy consumption is far below the Spanish national average. This occurrence has inspired an intense debate on the current development model of the Canary Archipelago, which has led to the implementation of actions a…
Teaching of energy issues: A debate proposal for a global reorientatiom
2007
The growing awareness of serious difficulties in the learning of energy issues has produced a great deal of research, most of which is focused on specific conceptual aspects. In our opinion, the difficulties pointed out in the literature are interrelated and connected to other aspects (conceptual as well as procedural and axiological), which are not sufficiently taken into account in previous research. This paper aims to carry out a global analysis in order to avoid the more limited approaches that deal only with individual aspects. From this global analysis we have outlined 24 propositions that are put forward for debate to lay the foundations for a profound reorientation of the teaching o…
The interaction between intermittent renewable energy and the electricity, heating and transport sectors
2012
In a global perspective, it is essential that the world transfers from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources in order to minimise climate change effects. As a part of such transition energy savings are also important, as they can decrease production costs effectively. The nature of such a change is that it has to be implemented on a local level. Energy saving technologies are placed with the demand decrease and renewable energy is typically distributed where the resources are. In some parts of the world, energy savings have resulted in a stabilisation of the energy demands, however in the world as such, demands are still increasing in buildings, transport and industry. Although the deman…