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Abstract This paper provides a forecast of electricity consumption in Cyprus up to the year 2030, based on econometric analysis of energy use as a function of macroeconomic variables, prices and weather conditions. If past trends continue electricity use is expected to triple in the coming 20–25 years, with the residential and commercial sectors increasing their already high shares in total consumption. Besides this reference scenario it was attempted to assess the impact of climate change on electricity use. According to official projections, the average temperature in the Eastern Mediterranean is expected to rise by about 1 °C by the year 2030. Using our econometrically estimated model, we calculated that electricity consumption in Cyprus may be about 2.9% higher in 2030 than in the reference scenario. This might lead to a welfare loss of 15 million Euros in 2020 and 45 million Euros in 2030; for the entire period 2008–2030 the present value of costs may exceed 200 million Euros (all expressed in constant Euros of 2007). Moreover, we assessed the additional peak electricity load requirements in the future because of climate change: extra load may amount to 65–75 Megawatts (MW) in the year 2020 and 85–95 MW in 2030.

Abstract One factor that significantly limits blade service life and reliability in GT-100 power turbines is sulphide-oxide metal corrosion of guide and rotating blades. Application of coatings is the most efficient method to prevent corrosion failure. An electron beam physical vapour deposition CoCrAlY coating is used for high and low pressure turbine first-stage rotating blades made from E1 893 alloy. Studies of CoCrAlY-coated blades after different service periods (from 390 to 5900 h) showed that this coating most efficiently protects rotating blades in turbines which operate in northern regions of the country. Because of low temperature hot corrosion leakage, corrosion failure is observed in turbines operating in southern regions of the country. In order to improve corrosion resistance, a ceramic coating has been developed. These coatings increase the endurance of equipment and make it possible to save energy.

Technical and economic developments in battery and fast-charging technologies could soon make fuel cell electric vehicles, which run on hydrogen, superfluous in road transport

The paper proves the economic feasibility of using a local autonomous source of energy supply, which is formed from electrical equipment of other functional purposes based on an asynchronous machine with capacitive self-excitation. To assess the technical and economic indicators of the effectiveness of introducing a local autonomous source of energy supply, the discounted method is adopted, where an indicator of savings from possible losses due to the exclusion of labor resources from production is used as an additional influence factor.

Optical system design has a significant impact on solar power plant efficiency. It can be advantageous to be able to very precisely adapt mirror shapes in order to improve energy yield. In this article it is investigated whether it is feasible to use non-uniform rational Beziers splines (NURBS) to describe mirrors. Algorithms and equations to evaluate optical performance by ray tracing are lined out. A parameterization scheme is given that reduces the degrees of freedom to a level suitable for automatic processing. To prove feasibility, a secondary reflector based on a NURBS surface and a compound parabolic concentrator (CPC) are designed for a specific test application and compared to each other. It is found that the suggested design method is feasible on contemporary personal computers and that the NURBS based surface performs well compared to the CPC.

For the evaluation of the detection and measurement limits for gamma-spectrometry measurements formulas were elaborated assuming the presence of the background component, which correlates with the analytical peak in the sense of: (1) linear relation between the expectation value of the peak and background counts, and (2) statistical correlation between peak and background counts. It is shown that neglecting the correlated background component can lead to a significant overestimation of the detection and measurement limits. The problem of evaluating of the correlated background component by applying experimental and computational approaches is also considered.