• Energy Research
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This research deals with the process of reviving urban heritage, especially in old cities after the war, due to their symbolic and moral values in society. By studying the reality of the city and its destructed heritage features, there was a local need to study the integrated strategies of the urban heritage revival process to reach indicators that are drawn from international experiences and the curricula and studies of international organizations (ICOMOS, World Bank, UN-Habitat, IOM) that interested in cultural heritage and to use these indicators in evaluating local projects in the center of the old city of Mosul which was chosen as a case study for this research, due to its historical and civilizational importance, which has contributed greatly to the formation of the city of Mosul through the ages, and as this city has witnessed deliberate sabotage of its urban heritage due to the terrorist acts witnessed before its liberation.

Advances in the phenology of organisms are often attributed to climate change, but alternatively, may reflect a publication bias towards advances and may be caused by environmental factors unrelated to climate change. Both factors are investigated using the breeding dates of 25 long-term studied populations of Ficedula flycatchers across Europe. Trends in spring temperature varied markedly between study sites, and across populations the advancement of laying date was stronger in areas where the spring temperatures increased more, giving support to the theory that climate change causally affects breeding date advancement.

Abstract Mitigating the effects of environmental deterioration requires a focus on not just CO2 emissions from energy consumption, but also environmental pollution from industry sectors. To reach this goal, recent studies have extended ecological footprint (EF) analysis to identify the ecological drivers of various key industry sectors. The role of the phosphorus (P) industry on the EF within the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) framework for China is the emphasis of this study. Autoregressive distributive lag (ARDL) as well as the impulse response function and robustness analysis were used to consider a time from 1985 to 2018. The study verifies the EKC hypothesis for China in both the long and the short run, and indispensable determinants are proposed to be included to assure the model’s fitness and robustness when conducting EF analysis of industry sectors. Energy consumption–based carbon emissions have been verified as the dominant contributor to EF, but P use and urbanization have a significant lagged positive influence on EF in the short run. P exports, in particular, have been highlighted as a critical driver of the EF of China’s P industry. The conducted frequency domain causality test reinforced the above findings and demonstrated bidirectional causality at different frequencies. This work suggests that formulating plausible P export policies to alleviate the conflict between the output of China’s P industry and the environmental sustainability of this industry are necessary. In this context, “multidisciplinary, multidimensional, and practical solutions” are most desirable for sustainable P management.

The growing number of electric vehicles in recent years is observable in almost all countries. The country’s energy transition should accompany this rise in electromobility if it is currently generated from non-renewable sources. Only electric vehicles powered by renewable energy sources can be considered zero-emission. Therefore, it is essential to conduct interdisciplinary research on the feasibility of combining energy recovery/generation structures and testing the energy consumption of electric vehicles under real driving conditions. This work presents a comprehensive approach for evaluating the energy consumption of a modern public building–electric vehicle system within a specific location. The original methodology developed includes surveys that demonstrate the required mobility range to be provided to occupants of the building under consideration. In the next step, an energy balance was performed for a novel near-zero energy building equipped with a 199.8 kWp photovoltaic installation, the energy from which can be used to charge an electric vehicle. The analysis considered the variation in vehicle energy consumption by season (winter/summer), the actual charging profile of the vehicle, and the parking periods required to achieve the target range for the user.

In this paper the German congestion management regime is analyzed and future congestion management costs are assessed given a higher share of intermittent renewable generation. In this context, cost-based re-dispatching of power plants and technical flexibility through topology optimization are considered as market-based and technical congestion management methods. To replicate the current market regime in Germany a two-step procedure is chosen consisting of a transactional spot market model and a congestion management model. This uniform pricing model is compared to a nodal pricing regime. The results show that currently congestion can mainly be managed by re-dispatching power plants and optimizing the network topology. However, congestion management costs tend to increase significantly in future years if the developments of transmission as well as generation infrastructure diverge. It is concluded that there is a need for improving the current congestion management regime to achieve an efficient longterm development of the German electricity system.

The investigation of degradation of seven distinct sets (with a number of individual cells of n $ 12) of state of the art organic photovoltaic devices prepared by leading research laboratories with a combination of imaging methods is reported. All devices have been shipped to and degraded at Risø DTU up to 1830 hours in accordance with established ISOS-3 protocols under defined illumination conditions. Imaging of device function at different stages of degradation was performed by laser-beam induced current (LBIC) scanning; luminescence imaging, specifically photoluminescence (PLI) and electroluminescence (ELI); as well as by lock-in thermography (LIT). Each of the imaging techniques exhibits its specific advantages with respect to sensing certain degradation features, which will be compared and discussed here in detail. As a consequence, a combination of several imaging techniques yields very conclusive information about the degradation processes controlling device function. The large variety of device architectures in turn enables valuable progress in the proper interpretation of imaging results—hence revealing the benefits of this large scale cooperation in making a step forward in the understanding of organic solar cell aging and its interpretation by state-of-the-art imaging methods.