• Energy Research
• FI close
• ES close
• AU close
• English close

Deep neural network (DNN) models dominate state-ofthe- art artificial intelligence. Due to their high computational cost, the use of hardware accelerators is key in any system that trains or deploys deep learning models. GPUs are widely used for executing neural networks, but they are too power hungry for many applications, especially in edge computing. In the last years, a wide variety of deep learning-specific accelerators have been proposed that greatly outperform GPUs in terms of energy efficiency, but even those accelerators are far from the desirable efficiency for many applications. In this extended abstract, we present two accelerator architectures we have designed in order to experiment with different energy efficiency maximization ideas.

The integration of Grid-Connected PV systems into buildings or public areas is one of the most usual applications of the photovoltaic solar energy in developed countries. Since early 2009, the University is working on an ambitious project, the so-called UNIVERSOL project, where its main goal is to convert the University Campus in a big public area which combines the PV electricity generation with the common uses of a university place. The aim of this paper is to show to the scientific community the main results of this project and that the methodology proposed for the “large urban-area photovoltaic potential” estimation can be easily exportable to other locations with similar characteristics, so the photovoltaic generators integration examples proposed in this project, and the software tools used to represent it, can be helpful for other designers, taking into account that this project has been adapted to the new Spanish legislation. 26th European Photovoltaic Solar Energy Conference and Exhibition; 4068-4072

This work addresses the techno-economic and environmental analysis of an Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle power plant (IGCC) of 308 MWe of gross power, giving particular attention to co-gasification and co-production of electricity and H2. Products, sub-products and effluents distributions are estimated by means of an ad-hoc developed superstructure for conceptual design of syngas generation and treatment, delivering preliminary fiowsheets targeted to co-production. The resulting multi-objective optimization problem evaluates the trade-off between the cost of energy (COE), the total energy efficiency of the plant and the environmental impact evaluated through Impact 2002+ indicator. Sixteen scenarios are considered: 4 different feedstock's combined with 4 alteruative plant topologies; electricity generation from syngas, electricity generation from H2, and purified H2 production from fiue gas in a Pressure Swing Adsorption (PSA) unit in the Combined Cycle (CC). The case studies environmental boundary has been drawn from cradle to gateo The Pareto Frontiers (PF) for the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) trade-off evaluation reveals that the scenario with petcoke as feedstock and H2 production with PSA fiue gas profit is the best one in terms of eHíciency maximization and COE minimization. Scenario with residual biomass without PSA fiue gas profit is the best in terms of environmental impact.

© 2013 Dr. Simon Chun Kwan Chui ; The period of drought from 1997 to 2010 in Melbourne, Australia saw significantly below average inflows into Melbourne’s reservoirs due to persistent high temperatures and low rainfall, conditions that climate change modelling suggest will occur more frequently in the future. In response to a dwindling water supply, water restrictions were enacted by the Victorian government to reduce water demand at the same time as infrastructure projects were commissioned to increase the water supply. These water restrictions limited the use of water outdoors, and had negative impacts on the suburban vegetation. A range of technical and behavioural adaptations could be made to mitigate these negative impacts by reducing the need for the use of potable mains water in the landscape, and this research explored the hypothesis that, over the course of the drought, changing attitudes towards climate change and water use in the suburban landscape resulted in behavioural adaptations by suburban dwellers in Melbourne that led to observable changes to the suburban landscape of Melbourne. Three research methods were used to investigate relationships between changes in Melbourne’s suburban landscapes and people’s attitudes towards water conservation in the context of drought and climate change, namely: (1) a content analysis of newspaper articles related to water restrictions in Melbourne to look at the ways in which the topics of drought and climate change had been addressed within the public discourse; (2) an observation of the suburban landscape of Melbourne using Google Street View and aerial photographs to identify the observable adaptations that have taken place in a sample of 530 front yards; and, (3) a questionnaire survey of households in Melbourne to assess their attitudes towards their own private landscapes, water conservation and restrictions, drought, and climate change and its impacts. It was found that, both in the newspapers and from analysis of the questionnaire data, people generally ...

The sustainability challenges of our time require engagement from all, and the potential for the arts and humanities to contribute has been undervalued and underutilized within sustainability science approaches. UNESCO sees education is seen as a key leverage point to shift society towards sustainability transformations however as with sustainability approaches in general, the potential of creativity and the arts remains untapped as a tool, topic, process, pedagogy and way of thinking. Inspired by a creativity assignment delivered in a Leadership in Sustainability course at Curtin University in Western Australia, this paper describes a Creativity in Action Project which was an assignment within the Advanced Leadership for Sustainability course at Blekinge Institute of Technology in Sweden. It was a year long course that ran through 2021. This paper articulates the purpose, design, pedagogy, content and learning process of the Creativity in Action Project and how it integrates the whole course. In brief, the students were invited to: “...explore the role creativity and/or the arts play, or could play, in expanding your thinking and in shifting paradigms that move people towards sustainability” and the intention of the project was to “...explore creative ways to enact change for sustainability in your lives or communities” through taking inspiration from artistic practices and processes. Through a feedback survey from the students, this study evaluates the project as a whole and identifies the key pedagogical elements that supported the students learning; what provided value and impact for the students; as well as discussing the challenges in doing such work. With permission from the students, this paper showcases some of the artistic and creative projects that the students completed. The intention of this paper is to provide educators and learning designers with inspiration and a practical, adaptable, and impactful creativity-based pedagogy for the development of sustainability leadership and key sustainability competencies that could be used and adapted to various contexts. It is hoped this will in turn support societal transition towards sustainability through empowering students to be sustainability change agents by applying their creativity to solve a sustainability challenge in real life.

The main objective of this project is to validate the wake generated behind a wind turbine with Large Eddy Simulation (LES). LES is currently the preferred technique for performing high-fidelity numerical simulations of flows around wind turbines, and is the one used in this work in order to characterise the wake generated by the wind turbine. The cases under study are a surface boundary layer and a single wind turbine case. Several methods are available to simulate the rotor, and actuator disc is the one implemented due to its low computational cost, making it the preferred option for wind turbine wake studies. The actuator disc models the effect of the wind turbine as an external force acting over the area covered by the rotor. A study on three different actuator disc forces is also done: a constant force, a force depending on the undisturbed wind velocity, and a force depending on the integrated velocity directly at the disc. The force chosen to validate the results is the force calculated with the undisturbed wind velocity, since it is proven to provide more real results. Validation is done by comparing the results of the wind turbine wake with those from the reference. Results show good agreement with the reference for low turbulence intensities, but are not reliable for higher turbulence intensities due to the difficulty of arriving to the statistical steady state. The simulations are performed with Alya, the multiphysics simulation HPC code developed at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. It has been used for wind energy simulations for more than ten years, making it a robust option for wind applications.

In Denmark, waste is not merely an environmental problem. Non-recyclable waste must be disposed of in an environmentally friendly manner. Danish waste incineration plants exploit the energy from waste, and the majority of plants produce both heat and electricity. Thus waste incineration plants are important suppliers of heat and electricity in Danish energy supply. In this project the technology of the waste incineration is studied with the final objective of improving the energy generated from that thinking about different treatments realized before the accessing of the waste to the incinerator. The incineration technology used in Denmark will be studied to figure out how the proposed solutions can be feasible in the system. Also the Danish energy system, heat and electricity production and consumption, will be considered to see which effects the incineration has on the network. All the figures are going to be based on the Odense CHP plant. The most important issue which is discovered at the end is that the sorting of the organic part of the waste is very useful and would generate an extra amount of energy if it was treated and biogas was obtained from that. Energy studies have been fulfilled for develop this statement. And also it has been compared with the possibility of sorting the different materials from the waste and then burn it separately at the incinerator. But this second option is not so much feasible because waste arrives in a very bad state, everything is mixed, and its sorting is not so much easy to take profit of it. The last option is based on the difference between summer and winter of heat consumption. This allows the decrease of the consumption of the energy from the waste during the summer and then, if the storage of the waste could be possible, more energy from the waste can be generated during the first months of the winter, when the heat is more necessary. Outgoing

In this work we analyse the profitability of the agents participating in a Local Energy Community (LEC); the agents in these communities can be either passive or active. The main difference is that active agents own generating units that they need to dispatch, whereas passive agents do not own any generating units. The LEC is operated and managed by a coordinating agent that is in charge of all energy exchanges between the agents in the LEC and the external Public Electricity Network (PEN). We propose a general optimization-based mathematical model to study the interactions among all the participants and to foresee strategies and optimal behaviour within the rules of the LEC. With this model we can compute optimal costs, profits, energy purchases and energy sales, assessing the best configuration for the LEC as a whole and for each individual participant. Política de acceso abierto tomada de: https://repqj.com/re&pqj/open-access/RE&PQJ-Open-Access.pdf Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech.

Seagrass meadows provide valuable socio-ecological ecosystem services, including a key role in climate change mitigation and adaption. Understanding the natural history of seagrass meadows across environmental gradients is crucial to deciphering the role of seagrasses in the global ocean. In this data collation, spatial and temporal patterns in seagrass meadow structure, biomass and production data are presented as a function of biotic and abiotic habitat characteristics. The biological traits compiled include measures of meadow structure (e.g. percent cover and shoot density), biomass (e.g. above-ground biomass) and production (e.g. shoot production). Categorical factors include bioregion, geotype (coastal or estuarine), genera and year of sampling. This dataset contains data extracted from peer-reviewed publications published between 1975 and 2020 based on a Web of Science search and includes 11 data variables across 12 seagrass genera. The dataset excludes data from mesocosm and field experiments, contains 14271 data points extracted from 390 publications and is publicly available on the PANGAEA® data repository (10.1594/PANGAEA.929968; Strydom et al., 2021). The top five most studied genera are Zostera, Thalassia, Cymodocea, Halodule and Halophila (84% of data), and the least studied genera are Phyllospadix, Amphibolis and Thalassodendron (2.3% of data). The data hotspot bioregion is the Tropical Indo-Pacific (25% of data) followed by the Tropical Atlantic (21%), whereas data for the other four bioregions are evenly spread (ranging between 13 and 15% of total data within each bioregion). From the data compiled, 57% related to seagrass biomass and 33% to seagrass structure, while the least number of data were related to seagrass production (11% of data). This data collation can inform several research fields beyond seagrass ecology, such as the development of nature-based solutions for climate change mitigation, which include readership interested in blue carbon, engineering, fisheries, global change, ...