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This research demonstrates economically optimal distributed energy resource (DER) system choice using the DER choice and operations optimization program, the Distributed Energy Resources Customer Adoption Model (DER-CAM). DER-CAM finds the optimal combination of installed equipment given prevailing utility tariffs and fuel prices, site electrical and thermal loads (including absorption cooling), and a menu of available equipment. It provides a global optimization, albeit idealized, that shows how site useful energy loads can be served at minimum cost. Five prototype Japanese commercial buildings are examined and DER-CAM is applied to select the economically optimal DER system for each. Based on the optimization results, energy and emission reductions are evaluated. Significant decreases in fuel consumption, carbon emissions, and energy costs were seen in the DER-CAM results. Savings were most noticeable in the prototype sports facility, followed by the hospital, hotel, and office building. Results show that DER with combined heat and power equipment is a promising efficiency and carbon mitigation strategy, but that precise system design is necessary. Furthermore, a Japan-U.S. comparison study of policy, technology, and utility tariffs relevant to DER installation is presented.

AbstractThe U.S. Department of Energy has launched the commercial building initiative (CBI) in pursuit of its research goal of achieving zero‐net‐energy commercial buildings (ZNEB), i.e., ones that produce as much energy as they use. Its objective is to make these buildings marketable by 2025 such that they minimize their energy use through cutting‐edge, energy‐efficiency technologies and meet their remaining energy needs through on‐site renewable energy generation. This paper examines how such buildings may be implemented within the context of a cost‐ or CO2‐minimizing microgrid that is able to adopt and operate various technologies: photovoltaic (PV) modules and other on‐site generation, heat exchangers, solar thermal collectors, absorption chillers, and passive/demand‐response technologies. A mixed‐integer linear program (MILP) that has a multi‐criteria objective function is used. The objective is minimization of a weighted average of the building's annual energy costs and CO2 emissions. The MILP's constraints ensure energy balance and capacity limits. In addition, constraining the building's energy consumed to equal its energy exports enables us to explore how energy sales and demand‐response measures may enable compliance with the ZNEB objective. Using a commercial test site in northern California with existing tariff rates and technology data, we find that a ZNEB requires ample PV capacity installed to ensure electricity sales during the day. This is complemented by investment in energy‐efficient combined heat and power (CHP) equipment, while occasional demand response saves energy consumption. A large amount of storage is also adopted, which may be impractical. Nevertheless, it shows the nature of the solutions and costs necessary to achieve a ZNEB. Additionally, the ZNEB approach does not necessary lead to zero‐carbon (ZC) buildings as is frequently argued. We also show a multi‐objective frontier for the CA example, which allows us to estimate the needed technologies and costs for achieving a ZC building or microgrid. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Developing Asia is the driver of today’s emissions intensive global economy. As the principle source of future emissions, the region is critical to the task of global climate change mitigation. Reflecting this global reality and a range of related domestic issues, the governments of the People’s Republic of China, India, Indonesia, Thailand, and Viet Nam have embarked upon an ambitious policy agenda. This report reviews the present and future policy settings for climate change mitigation and green growth in Asia’s major emerging economies.

SummaryHigh biomass crops have recently attracted significant attention as an alternative platform for the renewable production of high energy storage lipids such as triacylglycerol (TAG). While TAG typically accumulates in seeds as storage compounds fuelling subsequent germination, levels in vegetative tissues are generally low. Here, we report the accumulation of more than 15% TAG (17.7% total lipids) by dry weight in Nicotiana tabacum (tobacco) leaves by the co‐expression of three genes involved in different aspects of TAG production without severely impacting plant development. These yields far exceed the levels found in wild‐type leaf tissue as well as previously reported engineered TAG yields in vegetative tissues of Arabidopsis thaliana and N. tabacum. When translated to a high biomass crop, the current levels would translate to an oil yield per hectare that exceeds those of most cultivated oilseed crops. Confocal fluorescence microscopy and mass spectrometry imaging confirmed the accumulation of TAG within leaf mesophyll cells. In addition, we explored the applicability of several existing oil‐processing methods using fresh leaf tissue. Our results demonstrate the technical feasibility of a vegetative plant oil production platform and provide for a step change in the bioenergy landscape, opening new prospects for sustainable food, high energy forage, biofuel and biomaterial applications.

In the past 15 years, a major research enterprise has emerged that is aimed at understanding associations between geographic and contextual features of the environment (especially the built environment) and elements of human energy balance, including diet, weight, and physical activity. Here we highlight aspects of this research area with a particular focus on research and opportunities in the United States as an example. We address four main areas: 1) The importance of valid and comparable data concerning behavior across geographies, 2) The ongoing need to identify and explore new environmental variables, 3) The challenge of identifying the causally relevant context, and 4) The pressing need for stronger study designs and analytical methods. Additionally, we discuss existing sources of geo-referenced health data which might be exploited by interdisciplinary research teams, personnel challenges and some aspects of funding for geospatial research by the US National Institutes of Health in the past decade, including funding for international collaboration and training opportunities.

Numerical investigation for the impact of CO 2 geologic sequestration on regional groundwater flow Hajime Yamamoto a , Keni Zhang b , Kenzi Karasaki b , Atsunao Marui c , Hitoshi Uehara d , and Noriaki Nishikawa d a Taisei Corporation, 344-1 Nase-cho Totsuka-ku, Yokohama 245-0051, Japan Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, 1 Cyclotron Road, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA c National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, 1-1-1, #7 Higashi, Tsukuba 305-8567, Japan d Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, 3173-25 Showa-machi Kanagawa-ku, Yokohama 236-0001, Japan b Abstract Large-scale storage of carbon dioxide in saline aquifers may cause considerable pressure perturbation and brine migration in the deep formations, which may give rise to a significant influence on the regional groundwater system. With the help of parallel computing techniques, a comprehensive, large-scale numerical simulation of CO 2 geologic storage that predicts not only CO 2 migration but also its impact on regional groundwater flow was performed. As a case study, a hypothetical industrial-scale CO 2 injection in the Tokyo Bay, which is surrounded by the most industrialized area in Japan, was considered, and the impact of down-dip CO 2 injection on up-dip near-surface aquifers was investigated. A regional hydrogeological model with an area of about 60km×70km around the Tokyo Bay was discretized into about 10 million gridblocks. To solve the high-resolution model efficiently, we used a parallelized multiphase flow simulator TOUGH2-MP/ECO2N on a world-class high performance supercomputer in Japan, the Earth Simulator. In the simulation, CO 2 was injected into a storage aquifer at about 1km depths under the Tokyo bay from 10 wells with the total rate of 10 million tons/year for 100 years. Through the model, regional groundwater pressure build-up and seepage changes at land surface are examined. The results suggest that even if containment of CO 2 plume is ensured, pressure buildup in the order of tens of meters can occur in shallow confined layers of extensive regions including urban inlands. Keywords: CO 2 storage; parallel computation, large-scale simulation; groundwater pressure; Tokyo Bay; Kanto Plain; Earth Simulator 1. Introduction It is believed that the greenhouse gas may cause global climate change. One of the proposed approaches for reducing the greenhouse gas content in the atmosphere is through capturing CO 2 from large emission sources and injecting it into deep saline

Phase 1 of isotopes in the Project for Intercomparison of Land-surface Parameterization Schemes (iPILPS) compares the simulation of two stable water isotopologues (1H218O and 1H2H16O) at the land–atmosphere interface. The simulations are offline, with forcing from an isotopically enabled regional model for three locations selected to offer contrasting climates and ecotypes: an evergreen tropical forest, a sclerophyll eucalypt forest and a mixed deciduous wood. Here, we report on the experimental framework, the quality control undertaken on the simulation results and the method of intercomparisons employed. The small number of available isotopically enabled land-surface schemes (ILSSs) limits the drawing of strong conclusions, but, despite this, there is shown to be benefit in undertaking this type of isotopic intercomparison. Although validation of isotopic simulations at the land surface must await more and much more complete, observational campaigns, we find that the empirically based Craig-Gordon parameterization (of isotopic fractionation during evaporation) gives adequately realistic isotopic simulations when incorporated in a wide range of land-surface codes. By introducing two new tools for understanding isotopic variability from the land surface, the isotope transfer function and the iPILPS plot, we show that different hydrological parameterizations cause very different isotopic responses. We show that ILSS-simulated isotopic equilibrium is independent of the total water and energy budget (with respect to both equilibration time and state), but interestingly the partitioning of available energy and water is a function of the models' complexity.