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Applied Energy, 258 ISSN:0306-2619 ISSN:1872-9118

Energy-intensive manufacturing industries are characterised by high pollution and heavy energy consumption, severely challenging the ecological environment. Fortunately, environmental, social, and governance (ESG) can promote energy-intensive manufacturing enterprises to achieve smart and sustainable production. In Industry 4.0, various advanced technologies are used to achieve smart manufacturing, but the sustainability of production is often ignored without considering ESG performance. This study proposes a strategy of edge-cloud cooperation -driven smart and sustainable production to realise data collection, preprocessing, storage and analysis. In detail, kernel principal component analysis (KPCA) is used to decrease the interference of abnormal data in the eval-uation results. Subsequently, an improved technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) based on the adversarial interpretative structural model (AISM) is proposed to evaluate the production efficiency of the manufacturing workshop and make the analysis results more intuitive. Then, the architecture and models are verified using real production data from a partner company. Finally, sustainable analysis is discussed from the perspective of energy consumption, economic impact, greenhouse gas emissions and pollution prevention. Funding Agencies|Youth Innovation Team of Shaanxi Universities ?; Special ConstructionFund for Key Disciplines of Shaanxi Provincial Higher Education; Natural Science Basic Research Plan in Shaanxi Province of China [2022JQ-37]; Shaanxi Provincial Education Department [22JK0567]; Project of National Natural Science Foundation of China [62271390, 51905399]; Postgraduate Innovation Fund of Xian University of Posts and Telecommunications [CXJJDL2022012]

Asphalt concrete can absorb a considerable amount of the incident solar radiation. For this reason asphalt roads could be used as solar collectors. There have been different attempts to achieve this goal. All of them have been done by integrating pipes conducting liquid, through the structure of the asphalt concrete. The problem of this system is that all pipes need to be interconnected: if one is broken, the liquid will come out and damage the asphalt concrete. To overcome these limitations, in this article, an alternative concept is proposed:parallel air conduits, where air can circulate will be integrated in the pavement structure. The idea is to connect these artificial pore volumes in the pavement to an updraft or to a downdraft chimney. Differences of temperature between the pavement and the environment can be used to create an air flow, which would allow wind turbines to produce an amount of energy and that would cool the pavement down in summer or even warm it up in winter. To demonstrate that this is possible, an asphalt concrete prototype has been created and basics calculations on the parameters affecting the system have been done. It has been found that different temperatures, volumes of air inside the asphalt and the difference of temperature between the asphalt concrete and the environment are critical to maximize the air flow through the pavement. Moreover, it has been found that this system can be also used to reduce the heat island effect.

Abstract The planning of national power systems is traditionally based on long-term forecasts of electricity demand and fuel prices. However, over such long time horizons (20–50 years), these forecasts often prove to be inaccurate. As an example, wrong projections of low natural gas prices and high electricity demand in Europe in the early 2000s stimulated massive investments in electricity generation, which led to the current situation of overcapacity in the European electricity market. In this work, we first present the issue of overcapacity in Europe and discuss its causes; in particular, we highlight the relationship between overcapacity and errors in forecasts of electricity demand and fuel prices. Then, we apply a novel robust optimization framework to a real-world strategic energy planning problem, and compare it to the standard, deterministic decision-making approach. The results show that the robust investment strategies are up to 58% less likely to require future modifications leading to overcapacity. Overall, this suggests that considering uncertainties in the long-term planning process can reduce the risk of generating overcapacity in national power systems.

Abstract The objective of this article is to develop and test a simplified method to compute the savings in building cooling demand by use of passive cooling systems based on ventilation (direct night ventilation, air–soil heat exchangers, controlled thermal phase-shifting, evaporative cooling, as well as possible combinations thereof). The systems are characterized in terms of a climatic cooling potential, independently of any building, which is then compared to the cooling load of a particular building. The method is tested against an extensive numerical simulation campaign, combining diverse passive cooling systems and sizes with diverse constructive and operational modes for an administrative building situated in Geneva. The key point of the simplified method is to choose an appropriate time resolution, for taking into account the building thermal inertia. Although best results are obtained with a daily resolution, good results are also obtained with monthly data, where an overestimation of the passive cooling fraction remains less than 20% in half of the cases. This opens way for using the method for first assessing the potential of these passive cooling techniques on a large spatiotemporal scale, for which integrated building and system simulation becomes prohibitive.

Abstract The potential of both long-term (hydrogen storage) and short-term (batteries and thermal) storage systems in decentralized neighbourhoods are assessed using a multi-objective optimization approach that minimizes both costs and CO2 emissions. A method is developed, which evaluates the performance of long and short-term storage systems in the future based on multi-objective optimization. More specifically, hydrogen storage is investigated for its future potential to be used as a long-term storage in a decentralized context and it is compared with short-term storage systems such as batteries and thermal storage. In order to analyze potential future developments, a scenario approach is deployed based on the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change’s ‘Special Report on Emissions Scenarios’. Three future scenarios are defined and simulated for the years of 2015, 2020, 2035, and 2050 for both a rural and an urban neighbourhood in Switzerland. Based on the scenarios, the energy demand and renewable potential projections until 2050 are simulated including retrofitted buildings and renewable potential in the neighbourhoods. The Pareto front of solutions is then benchmarked against national carbon and energy targets from 2020 until 2050. In addition, a range of parameter assumptions (e.g., for economic variables, policy changes, environmental conditions) are used in each scenario to incorporate uncertainty into the analysis. The long-term storage potential of hydrogen, in particular, is evaluated for its capability to shift renewable surpluses in summer towards demand later in the year. From the results, it is predicted that neighbourhoods with high renewable surpluses (i.e., in rural settings) should consider the advantages of a hydrogen storage system from 2035 to 2050. For neighbourhoods with low surpluses, short-term battery and thermal storage systems are predicted to be sufficient for load shifting. It is also observed that a high feed-in remuneration undermines on-site consumption, thus resulting in lower levels of storage deployment due the selling of production back to the centralized electricity grid. Lastly, it is concluded that both an increase in renewable technology deployment and in the retrofit rate of buildings will both be required to meet energy targets for the two case studies. As the renewable potential in urban contexts is limited, it is particularly important for older building stock to be retrofitted at a high rate (more than 2% of buildings per year) in order to reduce the end energy demand of the buildings. The approach used in this article is widely applicable both in spatial scope (e.g., other decentralized energy systems, geographies) and temporal scope (e.g., different years, scenarios) and allows for an optimization with a range of objective functions, thus making it an effective approach to identify the renewable and storage technologies that can contribute to most of the decarbonization of the building stock in the future.

Following the societal electrification trend, airports face an inevitable transition of increased electric demand,driven by electric vehicles (EVs) and the potential rise of electric aviation (EA). For aviation, short-haul flightsare first in line for fuel exchange to electrified transportation. This work studies the airport of Visby, Sweden and the effect on the electrical power system from EA and EV charging. It uses the measured airport loaddemand from one year’s operation and simulated EA and EV charging profiles. Solar photovoltaic (PV) and electrical battery energy storage systems (BESS) are modelled to analyse the potential techno-economical gains.The BESS charge and discharge control are modelled in four ways, including a novel multi-objective (MO) dispatch to combine self-consumption (SC) enhancement and peak power shaving. Each model scenario iscompared for peak power shaving ability, SC rate and pay-back-period (PBP). The BESS controls are alsoevaluated for annual degradation and associated cost. The results show that the novel MO dispatch performswell for peak shaving and SC, effectively reducing the BESS’s idle periods. The MO dispatch also results in the battery controls’ lowest PBP (6.9 years) using the nominal economic parameters. Furthermore, a sensitivityanalysis for the PBP shows that the peak power tariff significantly influences the PBP for BESS investment.

Applied Energy, 272 ISSN:0306-2619 ISSN:1872-9118

Abstract Current energy systems models focus on cost minimization with a bound on some greenhouse gas emissions. This limited environmental scope can lead to mixes that are not consistent with our sustainable development. To circumvent this limitation, we here make use of the concept of monetization and life cycle assessment to quantify the indirect costs of electricity generation in the design of energy systems. Applying our approach to the United States, we found that the indirect costs of electricity generation could be reduced by as much as 63% by meeting the Paris Agreement. Consequently, the total opportunity cost (i.e., direct and indirect costs) of withdrawing from the Paris Agreement and continuing with the current mix would be as high as 1103 ± 206 billion USD2013 in 2030 (i.e., 6% of the United States gross domestic product in 2017). By optimizing the direct and indirect costs of electricity generation concurrently, we found an optimal ecological solution that attains total economic savings compared to the Paris Agreement mix of as much as 373 ± 164 billion USD2013 in 2030. Our work highlights the need to extend the environmental policies that regulate energy systems beyond the direct greenhouse emissions to consider other critical environmental criteria.

Abstract By integrating the building structure as thermal energy storage into the building services concept, thermally activated building systems (TABS) have proven to be economically viable for the heating and cooling of buildings. Having already developed an integrated design method and various control concepts in the past, in the present paper the impact of different aspects of TABS regarding the energetic performance of such systems is analyzed. Based on a simulation case study for a typical Central European office building, the following conclusions can be drawn. The energy efficiency of TABS is significantly influenced by the hydronic circuit topology used. With separate zone return pipes energy savings of approximately 15–25 kW h/m2 a, or 20–30% of heating as well as cooling demand, can be achieved, compared to common zone return pipes, where energy losses occur due to mixing of return water. A strong impact on energy efficiency can also be observed for the control strategy. Thus, by intermittent operation of the system using pulse width modulation control (PWM), the electricity demand for the water circulation pumps can be reduced by more than 50% compared to continuous operation. Concerning cold generation for TABS, it is shown that free cooling with a wet cooling tower is most efficient, if the cold source is the outside air. Variants with mechanical chillers exhibit 30–50% higher electricity demands for cold generation and distribution, even though their runtimes are much shorter compared to the cooling tower runtimes. In conclusion, the results show that significant energy savings can be achieved using adapted system topologies and applying appropriate control solutions for TABS.