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Abstract In recent years, modern appliances with high electricity demand have played a significant role in residential energy consumption. Despite the positive impact of these appliances on the quality of life, they suffer from major drawbacks, such as serious environmental concerns and high electricity bills. This paper introduces a consolidated framework of load management to alleviate those drawbacks. Initially, benefiting from a demonstrative analysis of home energy consumption data, controllable and responsive appliances in smart home are identified. Then, the energy consumption pattern is reduced and shifted using flexible load models and better utilization of existing energy storage systems. This can be achieved through data mining approaches, i.e., density-based spatial clustering of application with noise (DBSCAN) method. In this technique, no sensor for detection or measurement instruments will be required, whose deployment incur cost to the system or increase security risk for consumers. In the following, one scheduling of using controllable appliances, which is formulated by convex optimization, is considered for the demand response (DR) program, provided that this plan doesn't affect customers’ priority and convenience. In the last stage, the deployment of energy storage systems, such as plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) and battery energy storage systems (BESS), is introduced to lower the energy cost and improve the performance of the proposed DR model. Simulation results of this demand response are compared with conventional k-clustering methods to confirm the economic superiority of the DBSCAN clustering technique using the data of a residential unit during three different scenarios.

Abstract This paper presents an experimental investigation of a prototype rock bed solar collector. This collector consists of rocks in a galvanized iron box; the rocks are painted dull black and suitably glazed. The heat can be extracted by forced air convection. This system can act as a storage system, as well, when suitably constructed. The heat decay characteristic of the bed is also studied. A preliminary economic analysis of this air heater is presented.

The integration of sustainable practices into infrastructure projects under the auspices of public-private partnerships (PPPs) is vital in the attainment of United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Since the inception of the SDGs in 2015, the attention of world has been shifting towards more sustainable practices and it is essential that the conventional performance measurement models on PPP projects also adapt to the trend of sustainable practices. Therefore, This study aims at reviewing and operationalising sustainable performance measures for the PPP infrastructure projects. A systematic literature review (SLR) methodology was utilised in this study. The research process began with the search, retrieval and selection of thirty-three (33) journal articles. Thoroughly, the selected articles were contently analysed to form key themes that form the basis of this research’s findings. The outcomes of this review demonstrate twenty-seven (27) most critical sustainable performance criteria of PPP projects such as the lowest project costs, green index, disability-friendly inclusion rate and carbon emission per project among others. Although, the study is limited to few journal articles, it provides theoretical and practical understanding of integration of sustainability in PPPs. Further, it gives a list of relevant research gaps for further studies. This study contributes to the benchmarking and management of sustainable performance assessment of PPP projects.

This paper proposes a novel 3D micro-siting approach for optimal placement of wind turbines in the continuous space of a wind farm. Along with X and Y positions, hub height and rotor radius of each turbine is optimized to maximize the yield of the farm. Such 3D siting not only reduces the land requirement, but also extracts more power from the same site. Proposed 3D siting problem is formulated as a constrained optimization problem and solved by a particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm.

The design and assessment of net-zero buildings commonly focus exclusively on the operational phase, ignoring the embodied environmental impacts over the building life cycle. An analysis is presented on the consequences of integrating embodied impacts into the assessment of the environmental advantageousness of net-zero concepts. Fundamental issues needing consideration in the design process - based on the evaluation of primary energy use and related greenhouse gas emissions - are examined by comparing three net-zero building design and assessment cases: (1) no embodied impacts included, net balance limited to the operation stage only; (2) embodied impacts included but evaluated separately from the operation stage; and (3) embodied impacts included with the operation stage in a life cycle approach. A review of recent developments in research, standardization activities and design practice and the presentation of a case study of a residential building in Norway highlight the critical importance of performance indicator definitions and system boundaries. A practical checklist is presented to guide the process of incorporating embodied impacts across the building life cycle phases in net-zero design. Its implications are considered on overall environmental impact assessment of buildings. Research and development challenges, as well as recommendations for designers and other stakeholders, are identified.

The concept of resilience is a crucial part in crafting visions of desirable futures designed to withstand the widest variety of external shocks to the system. Backcasting scenarios are widely used to envision desirable futures with a discontinuous change from the present in mind. However, less effort has been devoted to developing theoretical frameworks and methods for building backcasting scenarios with a particular focus on resilience, although resilience has been explored in related sustainability fields. This paper proposes a method that helps design backcasting scenarios for resilient futures. A characteristic of the method is to delineate “collapse” futures, based upon which resilient futures are described to avoid the various collapsed states. In the process of designing backcasting scenarios, fault tree analysis (FTA) is used to support the generation of various risk factors and countermeasures to improve resilience. In order to test the effectiveness of the proposed method, we provide a case study to describe resilient energy systems for a Japanese community to 2030. Four expert workshops involving researchers from different disciplines were organized to generate diversified ideas on resilient energy systems. The results show that three scenarios of collapsed energy systems were described, in which policy options to be taken toward achieving resilient energy systems were derived.

Abstract Many countries committed themselves in the Kyoto protocol to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Some of these targeted emission reductions could result from a switch from coal-fired to gas-fired electricity generation. The focus in this work lies on Western Europe, with the presence of the European Union Emission Trading Scheme (EU ETS). For the switching to occur, several conditions have to be fulfilled. First, an economical incentive must be present, i.e. a sufficiently high European Union Allowance (EUA) price together with a sufficiently low natural gas price. Second, the physical potential for switching must exist, i.e. at a given load, there must remain enough power plants not running to make switching possible. This paper investigates what possibilities exist for switching coal-fired plants for gas-fired plants, dependent on the load level (the latter condition above). A fixed allowance cost and a variable natural gas price are assumed. The method to address GHG emission reduction potentials is first illustrated in a methodological case. Next, the GHG emission reduction potentials are addressed for several Western European countries together with a relative positioning of their electricity generation. GHG emission reduction potentials are also compared with simulation results. GHG emission reduction potentials tend to be significant. The Netherlands have a very widespread switching zone, so GHG emission reduction is practically independent of electricity generation. Other counties, like Germany, Spain and Italy could reduce GHG emissions significantly by switching. With an allowance cost following the switch level of a 50% efficient gas-fired plant and a 40% efficient coal-fired plant in the summer season (like in 2005), the global GHG emission reduction (in the electricity generating sector) for the eight modeled zones could amount to 19%.

Soft graphitizable carbon-based multifunctional nanomaterials have found versatile applications ranging from energy storage to quantum computing. In contrast, their hard-carbon analogues have been poorly investigated from both fundamental and application-oriented perspectives. The predominant challenges have been (a) the lack of approaches to fabricate porous hard-carbons and (b) their thermally nongraphitizable nature, leading to inaccessibility for several potential applications. In this direction, we present design principles for fabrication of porous hard-carbon-based nanostructured carbon florets (NCFs) with a highly accessible surface area (∼936 m2/g), rivalling their soft-carbon counterparts. Subjecting such thermally stable hard-carbons to a synergistic combination of an electric field and Joule heating drives their transformation to free-standing macroscopic monoliths composed of onion-like carbons (OLCMs). This represents the first such structural transformation observed in sp2-based hard-carbon NCFs to sp2-networked OLCMs. Micro-Raman spectroscopy establishes the simultaneous increase in the intensity of D-, 2D-, and D + G-bands at 1341, 2712, and 2936 cm-1 and is correlated to the reorganization in the disordered graphitic domains of NCFs to curved concentric nested spheres in OLCMs. This therefore completely precludes the formation of a nanodiamond core that has been consistently observed in all previously reported OLCs. The Joule heating-driven formation of OLCMs is accompanied by ∼5700% enhancement in electrical conductivity that is brought about by the fusion of outermost graphitic shells of OLCs to result in monolithic OLC structures (OLCMs). The porous and inter-networked OLCMs exhibit an excellent adsorption-based capture of volatile organic compounds such as toluene at high efficiencies (∼99%) over a concentration range (0.22-1.86 ppm) that is relevant for direct applications such as smoke filters in cigarettes.