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This paper proposes a polygeneration system based on a multi-input chemical looping combustion system, which generates methanol and electricity, through the use of natural gas and coal. In this system, the chemical looping hydrogen (CLH) production system and the coal-based methanol production system are integrated. A high quality fuel, natural gas, is used to improve the conversion ratio of coal. The Gibbs energy of the two kinds of fuels is fully used. Benefitting from the chemical looping process, 27% CO2 can be captured without energy penalty. With the same outputs of methanol and electricity, the energy savings ratio of the new system is about 12%. Based on the exergy analyses, it is disclosed that the integration of synthetic utilization of natural gas and coal plays a significant role in reducing the exergy destruction of the new system. The promising results obtained in this paper may lead to a clean coal technology that will utilize natural gas and coal more efficiently and economically.

Small-scale bio-energy projects have been launched in rural areas of China and are considered as alternatives to fossil-fuel energy. However, energetic and environmental evaluation of these projects has rarely been carried out, though it is necessary for their long-term development. A village-level biomass gasification project provides an example. A hybrid life-cycle assessment (LCA) of its total nonrenewable energy (NE) cost and associated greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is presented in this paper. The results show that the total energy cost for one joule of biomass gas output from the project is 2.93 J, of which 0.89 J is from nonrenewable energy, and the related GHG emission cost is 1.17 × 10−4 g CO2-eq over its designed life cycle of 20 years. To provide equivalent effective calorific value for cooking work, the utilization of one joule of biomass gas will lead to more life cycle NE cost by 0.07 J and more GHG emissions by 8.92 × 10−5 g CO2-eq compared to natural gas taking into consideration of the difference in combustion efficiency and calorific value. The small-scale bio-energy project has fallen into dilemma, i.e., struggling for survival, and for a more successful future development of village-level gasification projects, much effort is needed to tide over the plight of its development, such as high cost and low efficiency caused by decentralized construction, technical shortcomings and low utilization rate of by-products.

Socio-technical or strategic approach to renewable energy deployment all suggests that the uptake of renewable energy technology such as solar photovoltaic is as much a social issue as a technical issue. Among social issues, one most direct and immediate component is the cost of the renewable energy technology. Because renewable electricity provides no new functionality—a clean electron does the same work as a dirty electron does—but is relatively expensive compared with fossil fuel based electricity, there is currently an under-supply of renewable electricity. Policy instruments based on economics approaches are therefore developed to encourage the production and consumption of renewable electricity, aiming to remediate the market inefficiencies that stem from the failure in internalizing the environmental or social costs of fossil fuels. In this vein, the most discussed instruments are renewable portfolio standard or quota based system and the general category of feed-in tariff. Feed-in tariff is to support output or generation of the renewable electricity by subsidizing revenues. The existing discussions have all concerned about the relative effectiveness of these two instruments in terms of cost, prices and implementation efficiency. This paper attempts a different basis of evaluation of these two instruments in terms of cost and (network) externality effects. The cost effect is driven by deploying the renewable as a manufactured technology, and the network externality effect is driven by deploying the renewable as an information technology. The deployment instruments are studied in terms of how these two effects are leveraged in the deployment process. Our formulation lends itself to evolutionary policy interpretation. Future research directions associated with this new energy policy framework is then suggested.

All-electric ships are now a standard offering for energy/propulsion systems in boats. In this context, integrating fuel cells (FCs) as power sources in hybrid energy systems can be an interesting solution because of their high efficiency and low emission. The energy management strategy for different power sources has a great influence on the fuel consumption, dynamic performance and service life of these power sources. This paper presents a hybrid FC/battery power system for a low power boat. The hybrid system consists of the association of a proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) and battery bank. The mathematical models for the components of the hybrid system are presented. These models are implemented in Matlab/Simulink environment. Simulations allow analyzing the dynamic performance and power allocation according to a typical driving cycle. In this system, an efficient energy management system (EMS) based on operation states is proposed. This EMS strategy determines the operating point of each component of the system in order to maximize the system efficiency. Simulation results validate the adequacy of the hybrid power system and the proposed EMS for real ship driving cycles.

As an important part of the smart grid, a wide-area measurement system (WAMS) provides the key technical support for power system monitoring, protection and control. But 20 uncertainties in system parameters and signal transmission time delay could worsen the damping effect and deteriorate the system stability. In the presented study, the subspace system identification technique (SIT) is used to firstly derive a low-order linear model of a power system from the measurements. Then, a novel adaptive wide-area damping control scheme for online tuning of the wide-area damping controller (WADC) parameters using the residue method is proposed. In order to eliminate the effects of the time delay to the signal transmission, a simple and practical time delay compensation algorithm is proposed to compensate the time delay in each wide-area control signal. Detailed examples, inspired by the IEEE test system under various disturbance scenarios, have been used to verify the effectiveness of the proposed adaptive wide-area damping control scheme.

In this paper, petroleum product (mainly petrol and diesel) consumption in the transportation sector of China is analyzed. This was based on the Bayesian linear regression theory and Markov Chain Monte Carlo method (MCMC), establishing a demand-forecast model of petrol and diesel consumption introduced into the analytical framework with explanatory variables of urbanization level, per capita GDP, turnover of passengers (freight) in aggregate (TPA, TFA), and civilian vehicle number (CVN) and explained variables of petrol and diesel consumption. Furthermore, we forecast the future consumer demand for oil products during “The 12th Five Year Plan” (2011–2015) based on the historical data covering from 1985 to 2009, finding that urbanization is the most sensitive factor, with a strong marginal effect on petrol and diesel consumption in this sector. From the viewpoint of prediction interval value, urbanization expresses the lower limit of the predicted results, and CVN the upper limit of the predicted results. Predicted value from other independent variables is in the range of predicted values which display a validation range and reference standard being much more credible for policy makers. Finally, a comparison between the predicted results from autoregressive integrated moving average models (ARIMA) and others is made to assess our task.

Romania, a country in transition to a market economy, is associated to the European Union and has applied to become a member. It signed the European Energy Charter and is highly committed to harmonising its legislation with EU laws and regulations. In 2001, the Romanian Government approved 'The National Strategy for Development of Romanian Energy Sector' in the medium-term. The main objective of the strategy is the achievement of a competitive energy sector and an energy market harmonised with the EU, by taking into account risk problems. The energy sector in Romania has the benefit of substantial financial support from the international community: grants, loans and technical assistance programmes. An important part of these financial resources has been dedicated to energy efficiency improvement. The majority of the energy programmes were coordinated by the Ministry of Industry and Resources.

To reduce the influence of wind power output uncertainty on power system stability, demand response (DRPs) and energy storage systems (ESSs) are introduced while solving scheduling optimization problems. To simulate wind power scenarios, this paper uses Latin Hypercube Sampling (LHS) to generate the initial scenario set and constructs a scenario reduction strategy based on Kantorovich distance. Since DRPs and ESSs can influence the distribution of demand load, this paper constructs a joint scheduling optimization model for wind power, ESSs and DRPs under the objective of minimizing total coal cost, and constraints of power demand and supply balance, users’ demand elasticity, thermal units’ startup-shutdown, thermal units’ output power climbing and wind power backup service. To analyze the influences of ESSs and DRPs on system wind power consumption capacity, example simulation is made in a 10 thermal units system with a 1000 MW wind farm and 400 MW energy storage systems under four simulation scenarios. The simulation results show that the introduction of DRPs and ESSs could promote system wind power consumption capacity with significantly economic and environment benefits, which include less coal consumption and less pollutant emission; and the optimization effect reaches the optimum when DRPs and ESSs are both introduced.

Research on the nexus between energy consumption and economic growth is a fundamental topic for energy policy making and low-carbon economic development. Russia proves the third largest energy consumption country in the world in recent years, while little research has shed light upon its energy consumption issue till now, especially its energy–growth nexus. Therefore, this paper empirically investigates the dynamic nexus of the two variables in Russia based on the state space model. The results indicate that, first of all, Russia's energy consumption is cointegrated with its economic growth in a time-varying way though they do not have static or average cointegration relationship. Hence it is unsuitable to merely portrait the nexus in an average manner. Second, ever since the year of 2000, Russia's energy efficiency has achieved much more promotion compared with that in previous decades, mainly due to the industrial structure adjustment and technology progress. Third, among BRIC countries, the consistency of Russia's energy consumption and economic growth appears the worst, which suggests the complexity of energy–growth nexus in Russia. Finally, there exists bi-directional causality between Russia's energy consumption and economic growth, though their quantitative proportional relation does not have solid foundation according to the cointegration theory.