Energy Efficiency

Schools are complex physical and social institutions within national education systems. They account for significant energy consumption and like other buildings can demonstrate inefficient patterns of energy use. Poor energy performance of educational facilities is an intricate issue driven by complex causality of interconnected and dynamic factors. Addressing this issue requires a systemic approach, which is heretofore lacking. The aim of this research is to present and describe a systemic framework to facilitate energy reduction in schools across different European contexts. This transdisciplinary approach to sustainable energy use has been piloted in 13 post-primary schools located in six countries in northwest Europe. The research implements a series of planned activities and interventions, which help to unveil a systemic approach to improving energy efficiency in schools. The findings demonstrate how this approach, together with its ensuing methodologies and strategies, can contribute to reducing carbon emissions and improve knowledge and awareness around sustainable energy.

Low-carbon transition plans for temperate and sub-polar regions typically involve some electrification of space heating. This poses challenges to electricity system operation and market design, as it increases overall demand and alters the temporal patterns of that demand. One response to the challenge is to ‘smarten’ electrical heating, enabling it to respond to network conditions by storing energy at times of plentiful supply, releasing it in response to customer demands and offering rapid-response ancillary services to the grid. Shared operation of domestic electrical heating, in such a scenario, may imply changes in everyday heating practices and will change the number of system stakeholders, their activities and how they relate to each other. This paper sets out some practical and theoretical issues relating to the potential for residential demand response via electric storage heating, drawing on academic and policy-related literature and on material from a current research project. It offers a brief history of residential storage heating and recent developments, paying particular attention to customer experience; considers the role of distributed storage in energy transitions and associated questions of value; outlines how agency and value in a smart system may be distributed between stakeholders; and assesses continuity and change in storage heating. While the paper focuses on storage heating, many of the issue raised apply to heat pumps, given their functional similarities with storage heaters and water heaters. The paper concludes with some conditions to be met if smart storage heating is to succeed in the twin tasks of providing effective customer service and demand response, and sets out questions for further research into demand response and heating practices.

In table 1 columns 10 and 16, the value of the average price was updated. In Fig. 2b, some parts of the line graph were removed by mistake during production.

There are very few countries that have provisions addressing the energy efficiency of the whole street lighting system, such as Spain or the Netherlands. Nevertheless, there is not an agreement about how energy efficiency must be assessed. The Spanish Government contemplates it in the Royal Decree 1890/2008 with the goal of improving energy savings and efficiency. However, this has not obtained the expected results. Nowadays, energy efficiency of this kind of systems is assessed using a label. In the case of Spain, this label only assesses one magnitude. The contributions of this paper are two evaluation systems (kiviat diagram and pie chart) which assess five magnitudes: lamps, energy efficiency index, light pollution, renewable energy contribution, and harness of the luminous flux using dimming. After that, a survey was done to study several subjects: (1) if citizens are aware about the efficiency of street lighting systems, (2) whether the sample of colors used in the label is adequate, and (3) if our proposed systems could replace the current evaluation system. Finally, the paper finishes with the conclusions of the survey.

The need for energy efficient technological solutions is becoming ever more prevalent in today’s world. However, current advances are failing to offer end-consumers with a flexible solution that can be widely implemented in domestic or business environments. This is particularly relevant at the user interface level where energy consumers should be allowed to easily engage in effective energy saving technology. With the help of semantically linked data, we aim to actively assist end-consumers in making well-informed decisions in order to successfully control their energy consumption. By integrating smart metering and home automation functionality, our SESAME system offers end-consumers energy-efficient and cost-cutting options for their homes or businesses. The developed SESAME system conceptualizes, demonstrates and evaluates a variety of innovative end-consumer services, here focusing specifically on their user interface paradigms. In this paper, we present three types of interactive participatory user interfaces, all of which enable users to interact with the house automation settings modelled as semantic rules, as well their evaluation in user studies based on the demonstrator system. We show that the proposed interfaces have the potential for broad acceptance, and provide a detailed analysis of the effectiveness of their varying design principles and features.

The new concept of energy solvency is defined as the ability of a person buying or renting a dwelling to meet the energy costs necessary to keep the dwelling comfortable, without falling into energy poverty. The energy efficiency certificate information is used to calculate the economic expenditure that is theoretically necessary to maintain the property comfortable. This is a more robust value for calculating the energy poverty indicator 2 M than the available data on real expenditure. Dwellings’ maximum surface may be determined in order to guarantee the energy solvency, depending on the climate zone, the energy class, the energy sources used, and the household’s net income. The results indicate that in 15% of situations, it is not possible to have a dwelling that exceeds the minimum surface area stipulated by law without incurring an energy risk situation. It is also observed that in 86% of the cases, energy solvency is achieved for dwellings with energy classes A, B, C, and D, up to 120 m2. It is concluded that, by knowing the energy solvency before renting or buying a home, it is possible to prevent energy poverty by avoiding those operations in which it is known that this will happen.

Việc loại bỏ ánh sáng kém hiệu quả trong Liên minh Châu Âu (EU) có làm giảm đáng kể mức tiêu thụ điện năng trong hộ gia đình hay không? Đèn LED có thay thế các công nghệ chiếu sáng khác trong tương lai gần không? Việc thực hiện quyết định loại bỏ này tại EU sẽ thúc đẩy nhu cầu về các công nghệ chiếu sáng hiệu quả. Một trong những loại hiệu quả nhất, đèn LED, hứa hẹn sẽ mang lại những mức giảm thậm chí lớn hơn so với CFL. Tuy nhiên, để thu được lợi ích từ đèn LED, chúng phải thay thế các bóng đèn và thiết bị chiếu sáng hiện có. Bài báo này báo cáo kết quả từ các thử nghiệm về đèn LED trong những ngôi nhà thực tế. Nó chỉ ra những giới hạn của công nghệ LED đang có mặt trên thị trường hiện nay và rủi ro về hiệu ứng phục hồi. Bài báo này cũng đề cập đến một vấn đề chung hơn là sự phát triển lý thuyết trong lĩnh vực sử dụng điện năng trong hộ gia đình. Một "khung diễn giải" được trình bày trong đó việc sử dụng bộ chiếu sáng trong một ngôi nhà là cơ sở. Từ đó, các khía cạnh kinh tế xã hội và sự phụ thuộc vào con đường phát triển về quán tính kỹ thuật và văn hóa cũng như sự thay đổi biên có thể được phát triển.

There has been an increased in attention placed on the energy consumption of miscellaneous electronic loads in buildings by energy analysts and policymakers in recent years. The share of electricity consumed by consumer electronics in US households has increased in the last decade. Many devices, however, lack robust energy use data, making energy consumption estimates difficult and uncertain. Video game consoles are high-performance machines present in approximately half of all households and can consume a considerable amount of power. The precise usage of game consoles has significant uncertainty, however, leading to a wide range of recent national energy consumption estimates. We present here an analysis based on field-metered usage data, collected as part of a larger field metering study in the USA. This larger study collected data from 880 households in 2012 on a variety of devices, including 113 game consoles (the majority of which are Generation 7 consoles). From our metering, we find that although some consoles are left on nearly 24 h/day, the overall average usage is lower than many other studies have assumed, leading to a US national energy consumption estimate of 7.1 TWh in 2012. Nevertheless, there is an opportunity to reduce energy use with proper game console power management, as a substantial amount of game console usage occurs with the television turned off. The emergence of Generation 8 consoles may increase national energy consumption.

Recent studies investigating convergence in energy consumption at the sectoral level within a country suggest that aggregate energy consumption could mask considerable differential impacts that might be observed at the sectoral level. This study aims to contribute and complement the existing convergence literature with an attempt to analyze sectoral convergence in energy consumption from the developing country perspective. To this end, we choose Turkey as a developing country and employ both the conventional unit root tests and the residual augmented least squares-Lagrange multiplier (RALS-LM) methodology to investigate stochastic conditional convergence in per capita energy consumption at the sectoral level. Our findings suggest some interesting outcomes that could be relevant from the sectoral energy consumption perspectives for developing countries. While energy consumption in Turkey shows a trending upward, the leading sectors of industry and transport energy consumption per capita diverge from the mean consumption and, therefore, lead to further increases in energy consumption and energy-related emissions. Moreover, agriculture and the other sector, whose consumption per capita values are below the mean, converge towards the mean. Overall, Turkish sectoral energy consumption trends follow developing countries’ patterns, and the empirical findings suggest that this trend is worrying from the sustainability perspective.