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The Mega-Problems of Unsustainability
Published in Susan Krumdieck, Transition Engineering, 2019
The energy crisis generated great interest in alternative energy sources and resulted in new standards and regulations on energy efficiency for buildings, appliances and vehicles. The US government spending on energy research and development (R&D) went from $5.6 million in 1974 to $715.3 million in 1980 and the Solar Energy Research Institute was established (US IEA 2017(a)). There was a general sense that, with a ‘man on the moon’ type of collective effort, a technology revolution in alternative energy would be inevitable. The energy crisis also started a political obsession with energy independence as a national security objective that persists to this day. The realization that all critical activities rely on finite fossil fuels has influenced thinking about the future implications of depletion. Energy engineering emerged as a new field, primarily within mechanical engineering, with universities offering courses on energy conversion, air pollution, alternative energy and energy management. However, as oil fields in the North Sea and in non-OPEC nations were rapidly brought into production, the world oil supply increased again, and the oil price declined to a new price range below $30 per barrel. Throughout the 1990s, it became politically unpopular to worry about energy shortages. In fact, the discussion around fossil fuel use and the impact of development of the resources in remote and higher risk environments became polarized and was framed in terms of the environment versus the economy.
Energy, Environment, and Renewable Energy
Published in Radian Belu, Fundamentals and Source Characteristics of Renewable Energy Systems, 2019
Energy conversion, such as that which is concerned mainly with converting direct or indirect forms of solar radiant energy to electrical, mechanical, or chemical energy, is the main topic of this chapter, as well as the book. Energy cannot be created or destroyed, but is only transformed from one form to another. The sole exception is nuclear, which is derived from a reduction in mass of the fuel but this, however, is mostly handled by physicists. Thus, strictly speaking, energy engineering is simply the engineering of transformation of energy between its different forms. One can distinguish between primary forms of energy that are found naturally, and secondary forms into which they can be transformed to enable easier transportation, usage, and storage. It is possible to necessitate more than one transformation to get it into a final useful form. There also energy forms that need less processing since they are closer to the form in which they will be finally used, which is the final state in which it can be used for some purpose. An example of a primary form is petroleum, which is found in nature, and a secondary form is electricity, which is not found in nature but which can be obtained from it. The useful form may be work that is needed to perform a certain mechanical task. Energy is an essential component of our daily lives and a vital source of economic development and national welfare. Humans discovered and learned how to make fire to cook meat, to deter predators, and to make tools and deadly weapons from metals, shifting the energy balance nature into irreversible one. During Industrial Revolution methods were discovered to convert heat into electricity, the most versatile and convenient form of energy. Electricity enabled astonishing scientific and technological advances, transforming our civilization and way of life. However, it comes with an unprecedented fossil fuel use and adverse environmental impacts, making us also dependent on a complex energy infrastructure for transportation, communication, heating, lighting, industrial processes and distribution of goods. Energy conversion is a multidisciplinary and disparate subject of applied sciences, requiring an understanding of physical and engineering principles. Energy issues also tend to be open and controversial issues, need to be address with an open an independent mind, being a rewarding and intellectually stimulating exercise. Throughout our history, the energy harnessing in its various forms presented great challenges and stimulated scientific and technological discoveries, while our energy usage has increased at an accelerate pace.
How to make project plans trustworthy: an investigation based on multi-criteria contractor selection
Published in International Journal of Logistics Research and Applications, 2023
Hao Ying, Shanshan Zhang, Xiande Zhao, Min Zhang
An operator in the platform granted us partial access to its proprietary database, which contains information on bidding projects, features of bidders, evaluation terms, evaluation ratings and the final decision of contractor selection. The e-bidding platform has been widely used in construction projects in three Chinese provinces (i.e. Henan, Shanxi and Shandong). After data cleaning, we obtained data from 614 construction projects (Panel A in Table 1). In particular, road engineering projects include the projects of highways, bridges, railways, and tunnels between cities and rural and urban areas. Municipal facilities refer to various public infrastructures supporting urban life such as urban roads, bridges, subways, pipelines, squares and greening. Building projects include the construction, reconstruction or expansion of buildings and related electrical wiring, equipment installation and decoration projects. Water engineering projects aim to meet the needs of living and production by constructing facilities such as dams, sluices, intakes, spillways, and channels. Energy engineering refers to projects related to the production, transmission, distribution of electrical energy and supporting projects. In addition to the former categories, we consider other engineering projects including drilling, blasting, cleaning and building demolition. It is noteworthy that we exclude bids of package construction projects, the target of which is the selection of a contractor for the entire project that consists of a feasibility study, survey, design, procurement, construction, trial operation, and maintenance. The additional tasks of the package constructions lift the requirements for bidders and are formidable for most conventional contractors. Moreover, the evaluation criteria and required bidding materials of package constructions and standard constructions are also differentiated by the industrial authority. Accordingly, the contractor selection mechanism of package constructions is idiosyncratic, and thus, the associated bidding data are excluded from the study. Panel B in Table 1 presents the descriptive statistics of all enterprises that have bid on standard construction projects. The large size of the bidding group indicates fierce competition among bidders. Moreover, the online mode has created an easy way for small and young contractors to participate in the competition. The dispersed distribution of the bidders with regard to their capital scale and age indicates that these company features are not always restricted.