• Energy Research
• 12. Responsible consumption close
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• Karlsruhe Institute of Technology close

Emerging energy storage systems based on abundant and cost-effective materials are key to overcome the global energy and climate crisis of the 21st century.

Sustainability is now a major concern in society, but there is little understanding of how it is perceived by software engineering professionals and how sustainability design can become an embedded part of software engineering process. This paper presents the results of a qualitative study exploring requirements engineering practitioners’ perceptions and attitudes towards sustainability. It identifies obstacles and mitigation strategies regarding the application of sustainability design principles in daily work life. The results of this study reveal several factors that can prevent sustainability design from becoming a first class citizen in software engineering: software practitioners tend to have a narrow understanding of the concept of sustainability; organizations show limited awareness of its potential opportunities and benefits; and the norms in the discipline are not conducive to sustainable outcomes. These findings suggest the need for focused efforts in sustainability education, but also a need to rethink professional norms and practices.

The bigger picture Renewable energy technologies are necessary to maintain secure energy supplies and limit the impacts of climate change. Developments of these technologies are mostly planned purely based on economic criteria, but this can lead to resistance in local communities. Among the diverse renewable technologies, especially onshore wind turbines may negatively affect the scenicness of beautiful landscapes. We analyze how cost-efficient local energy systems could be impacted through public opposition toward onshore wind. In doing so, we draw on a database of public evaluation of landscape beauty across Germany. In the energy systems of German municipalities with high scenicness, onshore wind would mainly be replaced by solar photovoltaics. Depending on the location, the local energy systems may be associated with a significant increase in costs and CO$_{2}$ emissions. These insights can support local and national stakeholders in making decisions relating to energy and climate policy. Summary Local resistance often hinders renewable energy technology developments, especially for onshore wind. In decentralized energy systems, the landscape impact of wind turbines or transmission lines is a key barrier to public acceptance. By using landscape scenicness as a proxy for public acceptance, we quantify its impact on the optimal energy systems of 11,131 German municipalities. In municipalities with high scenicness, it is likely that onshore wind will be rejected, leading to higher levelized costs of energy by up to about 7 €-cent/kWh. Onshore wind would be replaced mainly by solar photovoltaics and imports, and the cost-optimal energy systems would be associated with higher CO$_{2}$ emissions of up to about 200 gCO$_{2}$/kWh compared with an average of around 50 gCO$_{2}$/kWh. The findings help to identify municipalities where public resistance to onshore wind could be particularly high and support the scientific and policy debate about the location of onshore wind farms.

This study aimed to investigate the operation of a 1000L microalgae-based membrane photobioreactor system in a greenhouse for continuous secondary wastewater treatment using Desmodesmus sp., a green microalgae strain originally isolated from a German sewage plant. The research spanned both summer and winter seasons, seeking to comprehend key trends and optimization strategies. Maintaining low cell concentrations in the photobioreactor during periods of light inhibition proved advantageous for nutrient uptake rates. Effective strategies for enhancing algae-based wastewater treatment included cell mass recycling, particularly during periods of high light availability. In comparison to conventional continuous cultivation methods, employing cell recycling and high dilution rates during times of abundant light, alongside using low cell concentrations and dilution rates during light inhibition, resulted in an 80 % and 10 % increase in overall biomass productivity during summer and winter, respectively. Furthermore, nitrogen/phosphorus (N/P) removal rates exhibited a 23 % improvement during winter, while remaining unchanged in summer.

AbstractThe 2011 White Paper on Transport of the European Commission spells out a series of targets for 2030 and 2050. One of the 10 targets is explicitly related to urban transport and stipulates: “Halve the use of ‘conventionally fuelled’ cars in urban transport by 2030; phase them out in cities by 2050. Achieve essentially CO2-free city logistics in major urban centres by 2030.”With this paper we present and discuss a roadmap that deals with the question who needs to do what by when in order to reach the White Paper goal for urban transport. The “stakeholder-driven” roadmap was developed in the FP7 project TRANSFORuM. The paper will present the key findings and the suggested action steps identified in the roadmap. The paper will also exemplify three possible urban transformation pathways towards the urban target. This approach emerged from stakeholder consultations which highlighted the need to take into account the widely differing conditions among European cities.

AbstractGlobally, soils store two to three times as much carbon as currently resides in the atmosphere, and it is critical to understand how soil greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and uptake will respond to ongoing climate change. In particular, the soil‐to‐atmosphere CO2 flux, commonly though imprecisely termed soil respiration (RS), is one of the largest carbon fluxes in the Earth system. An increasing number of high‐frequency RS measurements (typically, from an automated system with hourly sampling) have been made over the last two decades; an increasing number of methane measurements are being made with such systems as well. Such high frequency data are an invaluable resource for understanding GHG fluxes, but lack a central database or repository. Here we describe the lightweight, open‐source COSORE (COntinuous SOil REspiration) database and software, that focuses on automated, continuous and long‐term GHG flux datasets, and is intended to serve as a community resource for earth sciences, climate change syntheses and model evaluation. Contributed datasets are mapped to a single, consistent standard, with metadata on contributors, geographic location, measurement conditions and ancillary data. The design emphasizes the importance of reproducibility, scientific transparency and open access to data. While being oriented towards continuously measured RS, the database design accommodates other soil‐atmosphere measurements (e.g. ecosystem respiration, chamber‐measured net ecosystem exchange, methane fluxes) as well as experimental treatments (heterotrophic only, etc.). We give brief examples of the types of analyses possible using this new community resource and describe its accompanying R software package.