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Renewable Energy
Published in Chitrarekha Kabre, Synergistic Design of Sustainable Built Environments, 2020
Historically, biomass has been in use since people first began burning wood for domestic cooking and space heating. The modern use of biomass in more focused applications to produce biopower (heat and electricity), biofuels, and bioproducts began around the late 20th century, ushering a true renaissance of this traditional renewable energy source. For many countries, the use of biomass will be an important pillar of their energy portfolio in the future. Biomass is the largest source of renewable energy in the United States, comprising 43.5% of all renewable energy generation in the year 2019. Biopower, which uses biomass to generate heat and/electricity, is the application of interest for the sustainable built environment, and so is the thrust of this section.
Values, choices and needs
Published in David Bernell, Christopher A. Simon, The Energy Security Dilemma, 2016
David Bernell, Christopher A. Simon
This graph succinctly illustrates all US energy production and usage, and clearly shows the relative prevalence of different fuel sources, as well as their uses and how efficient they are (the level of energy lost is indeed staggering). The visual representation reinforces the abundantly clear point that coal, oil and natural gas power the United States of America, accounting for 82% of all energy used in the US. By contrast, just over 9 quads came from solar, wind, geothermal, hydro and biomass power combined, which is 9.4% of the total, and solar and wind accounted for only 1.9 quads of energy (up from 0.156 quads in 200539), less than two percent of the total. As was noted above, despite the prevalence of news stories, websites and advertisements proclaiming the increased use of renewable energy sources, the United States and the world have only just begun to take the first steps toward the widespread use of renewable energy sources in their respective energy portfolios. Another key piece of information that the graph clearly depicts is the massive opportunity for greater energy efficiency. Well over half of all the energy produced from all sources is wasted or “rejected energy,” largely in the form of heat, as efficiency losses occur in the conversion from fuel to the intended uses.
Introduction
Published in Robert Ehrlich, Harold A. Geller, John R. Cressman, Renewable Energy, 2023
Robert Ehrlich, Harold A. Geller, John R. Cressman
China is, in most regards, the leader in renewable energy. They produce nearly three times the renewable energy as the United States, which is second. Renewable sources accounts for over 24.35% of China’s total electricity capacity compared to 14.7% for the United States. Together, China and the United States have invested half the world’s total toward developing renewable energy, but it also needs to be said that they account for nearly half of the world’s CO2 emissions, which is not too surprising as they are the two largest economies.
Economic and performance investigation of hybrid PV/wind/battery energy system for isolated Andaman and Nicobar islands, India
Published in International Journal of Ambient Energy, 2021
Pikaso Pal, V. Mukherjee, Akbar Maleki
HOMER, developed by National Renewable Energy Laboratory of United States, is mainly used for modelling of PV/wind/hybrid energy system. The optimum sizing of various components of the PV/wind/hybrid energy system can be precisely estimated by using HOMER (Lambert and Lilienthal 2004) software which performs hundreds or thousands of hourly simulations to ensure the best feasible matching between the power available from energy system and the end-user demand. HOMER requires fundamental input information such as solar insolation, wind speed, electrical loads, economic constrains and ambient temperature. Based on input information, the automatic sensitivity analysis along with the technical feasibility of the system, economic analysis, rank of the systems according to total NPC is performed by employing this software (Connolly et al. 2010; Shaahid and Elhadidy 2008). HOMER cannot model transient changes which are smaller than one hour (Mondal and Denich 2010). Therefore, hourly basis values are taken into account for the present study. The detailed information, in the context of economic analysis, methodology and sizing of PV/wind/hybrid system, are described in the succeeding sub-sections.