Current Sustainable/Renewable Energy Reports

This paper highlights the main impacts of transportation and building electrification on electricity grid infrastructure, operations, and planning. We focus on which electric technologies are expected to grow, how electrification will impact electricity demand and grid activities, and which solutions might improve the integration of these technologies. Recent industry reports show increasing projections of electrification technologies in the coming decades. Studies show that increased demand from electrification will likely require grid capacity expansion and make grid operations and planning more challenging; however, multiple non-wires solutions exist to ensure integration is efficient and cost-effective. Electrification of space heating and especially transportation is expected to have the largest impact on electricity demand in the near future. Uncontrolled electric vehicle charging poses a significant challenge to grid operations, but control strategies create an opportunity for improved efficiency. Other insights include a high level of uncertainty in electrification adoption and potential benefits of combining electrification technologies with renewable generation and energy storage.

The fast growth of gas-fired generating units and the new emerging power-to-gas (PtG) technology have intensified the interdependency of the electricity grid and the natural gas network. Indeed, the security and economy of one system could directly and significantly affect that of the other. In observing these new trends and changes, a coordinated optimization between the two energy systems has attracted increasing attentions in recent years, which is believed to derive much more satisfactory solutions than optimized separately. Thus, this paper provides a comprehensive review of existing works on the coordination of interdependent electricity grid and natural gas network. The paper first highlights the modeling of key coupling components and discusses various coordination strategies of the two energy systems. The review then focuses on three major aspects of the coordination: coordinated short-term scheduling, coordinated long-term expansion planning, and energy market and energy hub. Research and practical implementation on coordination of the interdependent electricity and natural gas system (IENS) are still in the infant stage. Challenges and potential future research directions that could further benefit the secure, reliable, and economic operation and planning of future IENS are summarized.

The role of the class I railroads in the USA in hauling both coal and crude oil has changed a good deal in recent years. Though coal remains the single most important commodity for US railroads, the volume carried has been declining since 2008. On the other hand, though oil and other petroleum products continue to account for a fairly small share of the freight hauled by US railroads, that share has been growing continuously since early 2010. As a result of this rapid increase and the accidents that have accompanied it, regulators have imposed new and costly restrictions on the railways. This paper discusses the factors behind these two trends—largely the decline in coal’s share in electricity generation and the increased application of new technologies in oil and gas regions far from pipelines—and discusses some of the regulatory and policy implications, in addition to the impacts on the railroads themselves.

This paper highlights recent developments in utility scale concentrating solar power (CSP) central receiver, heat transfer fluid, and thermal energy storage (TES) research. The purpose of this review is to highlight alternative designs and system architectures, emphasizing approaches which differentiate themselves from conventional solutions. The push for increased efficiency and compatibility with high-temperature power cycles has driven the development of advanced receiver concepts utilizing various heat collecting media. Published work can be grouped into three technologies like US Department of Energy Gen3 CSP pathways: liquid, gas, and solid receivers, each with TES approaches ideally suited for system integration. Most experimental work has focused on material property investigation, with few system-level validations at meaningful scales. Innovative solutions utilizing advances in design, materials, and manufacturing are being pursued to realize advanced CSP-TES systems. Of those concepts built and tested, demonstrations have shown promise and remain topics of active development. With continued development, these systems can offer alternative pathways towards low-cost, dispatchable electricity production.

This review focuses on recent developments in the application of behavioral economics to the evaluation of energy efficiency and greenhouse gas regulations. Transportation is the largest source of CO2 emissions from energy use in the US economy and a major and growing source worldwide. Regulating the efficiency of motor vehicles has been a core component of energy policy in the USA, the EU, China, Japan, Canada, and many other nations. Recent findings concerning consumers’ actual decision-making about energy efficiency indicate that the premises of the rational economic model are not appropriate for evaluating energy-efficiency standards. Progress in behavioral psychology and economics has shown that loss aversion, the principle that faced with a risky choice human beings tend to weigh potential losses about twice as heavily as gains, is strongly affected by framing. Simple, risky choices in which there is a status quo option generally provoke loss-averse responses. Recent analyses show that the choice to buy or not buy energy-efficiency technologies induces loss aversion and can result in systematic underinvestment in energy efficiency. Empirical investigation of consumers’ fuel economy decision-making contradicts the rational economic model and is consistent with loss aversion. However, recent economic evaluations of fuel economy and greenhouse gas regulations are explicitly or implicitly premised on rational economic behavior. Insights developed by behavioral psychologists and behavioral economists about the decision-making of real consumers provide a coherent explanation that fundamentally alters the way fuel economy regulations should be evaluated. If consumers are assumed to make decisions according to the rational economic model and markets are reasonably efficient, regulations cannot produce large private fuel savings. The behavioral economic model explains not only why such savings do exist but why consumers strongly support fuel economy regulations. The private savings from fuel economy regulations can be large relative to the social benefits of fuel economy and greenhouse gas regulations.

The objective of the present study is, firstly, to identify the types of transaction costs that can be found for a company from the biomass to energy sector. The chosen company has transaction costs in the context of an in-operation company, i.e., a business already in use. A review of the existing relationship between the company and its local biomass suppliers is also explored, being the key factor to evaluate due to its overall importance, as these suppliers ensure the raw material flow to maintain the operation of the production unit. It was found that it is possible to apply the same analysis and business monitoring methodologies to the biomass-to-energy sector, similar to what is already happening with other sectors of industrial activity. Thus, it was verified after the analysis that it is possible for the company to obtain better productivity yields, especially if the assumptions of the transaction cost theory are optimized. By acknowledging the beneficial effects on the environment by replacing fossil fuels with wood pellets, this study aims, in the context of a pellet producer, to analyze the transaction costs of the entire process of biomass transformation in pellets, from raw materials to processing. This study analyses the value chain of the company by applying transaction cost theory to determine if there is a viable application and to identify which are the transaction costs in the company. The results of this study agree with others carried out under the same theme, thereby supporting the viability of vertical integration and the sustainability of the pellet production industry.

Wind energy being one of the cheapest and easily available sources of energy is very important to meet increasing demand for green energy in India. Wind energy is a clean, eco-friendly, renewable resource having better spread across the country compared to most of the conventional energy sources. This review covers recent developments in the field of wind energy in the country and highlights progress in the areas of wind installation, production, and consumption actively supported by policy formulations, design, and implementation of incentive schemes, and monitoring the effective implementation of the policy frameworks. Further, this paper reviews existing drivers and bottlenecks and identifies future drivers of wind growth in India. It is found that financing of wind projects remains as one of the most important challenges, and the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy is constantly trying to overcome the same. It is anticipated that future wind power developments will be largely driven by the formation of Renewable Energy Act, successful implementation of Offshore Wind Energy Policy, and low-cost financing.

In light of the urgent need and ambition of African communities to scale up the deployment of renewable energy, this article explores the benefits and challenges presented by regional coordination in Africa, and how recent planning studies are reflecting those aspects in their analysis of future power sector expansion on the continent. Regional approaches to renewable deployment in Africa can reduce overall system costs and improve operation by expanding access to higher quality renewable resources, while unlocking a greater diversity of renewable options. Regional approaches can also provide greater flexibility and stability to national power systems, as well as complementarity that allows countries to scale up development of single sources while still reducing risks related to climate variability and future change. Based on a long history of experience, the benefits of regional approaches to power sector development and operation are now well established. New methodologies using more granular geospatial and temporal data have emerged to make the analysis of these benefits more feasible and more detailed. Novel additions to planning studies are also presenting more nuanced insights into the implications that climate change, technological innovations, and socio-political influences could have on regional renewable energy deployment.