Toward an Efficient and Sustainable Use of Energy in Industries and Cities

Supporting Local Authorities to Plan Energy Efficiency in Public Buildings: From Local Needs to Regional Planning

The support offered to local authorities in this work consisted of technical and economic training on the integration of energy efficiency measures as well as the development of tools (guidelines, a decision support tool, databases and a visualization platform) that allow local authorities to prepare their building renovation plans. These tools are found very useful for local authorities, particularly in the case of Teruel province, characterised by many small municipalities whose local governments do not have the technical staff to undertake this type of planning. As a result of this work, an energy action plan was elaborated for the implementation of 96 energy efficiency measures in public buildings of Teruel province. The execution of this plan would allow energy savings of 1.3 MWh/year and 245 tonsCO2e/year of CO2 emission reduction, involving an investment of EUR 1.2 M. The close collaboration with public authorities made it possible to assess the strengths and weaknesses of using the developed tools. One of the barriers found is the availability of accurate building data (e.g., regarding envelope features) necessary for the decision support tool.

Data-Driven Optimal Design of a CHP Plant for a Hospital Building: Highlights on the Role of Biogas and Energy Storages on the Performance

Combined heat and power (CHP) generation plants are an assessed valuable solution to significantly reduce primary energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions. Nevertheless, the primary energy saving (PES) and CO2 reduction potentials of this solution are strictly related to the accurate definition and management of thermal and electric loads. Data-driven analysis could represent a significant contribution for optimizing the CHP plant design and operation and then to fully deploy this potential. In this paper, the use of a bi-level optimization approach for the design of a CHP is applied to a real application (a large Italian hospital in Rome). Based on historical data of the hospital thermal and electric demand, clustering analysis is applied to identify a limited number of load patterns representative of the annual load. These selected patterns are then used as input data in the design procedure. A Mixed Integer Linear Programming coupled with a Genetic Algorithm is implemented to optimize the energy dispatch and size of the CHP plant, respectively, with the aim of maximizing the PES while minimizing total costs and carbon emissions. Finally, the effects of integrating biogas from the Anaerobic Digestion (AD) of the Spent Coffee Ground (SCG) and Energy Storage (ES) technologies are investigated. The results achieved provide a benchmark for the application of these technologies in this specific field, highlighting performances and benefits with respect to traditional approaches. The effective design of the CHP unit allows for achieving CO2 reduction in the order of 10%, ensuring economic savings (up to 40%), when compared with a baseline configuration where no CHP is installed. Further environmental benefits can be achieved by means of the integration of AD and ES pushing the CO2 savings up to 20%, still keeping the economical convenience of the capital investment.

Energies and Its Worldwide Research

Energy efficiency and management is certainly one of the key drivers of human progress. Thus, the trends in the energy research are a topic of interest for the scientific community. The aim of this study is to highlight global research trends in this field through the analysis of a scientific journal indexed exclusively in the energy and fuels category. For this purpose, a journal has been selected that is in the center of the category considering its impact factor, which is only indexed in this category and of open access, Energies of the publisher MDPI. Therefore, a bibliometric analysis of all the contents of the journal between 2008 and 2020, 13,740 documents published, has been carried out. Analyzing the articles that are linked to each other by their citations, 14 clusters or research topics have been detected: smart grids; climate change–electric energy community; energy storage; bioenergy sources; prediction algorithms applied to power; optimization of the grid link for renewable energy; wind power; sustainability of power systems; hydrocarbon improvements; conversion of thermal/electrical energy; electric motor advancements; marine renewable energy; hydropower and energy storage; and preventive techniques in power transformers. The main keywords found were electric vehicle, renewable energy, microgrid, smart grid, and energy efficiency. In short, energy research remains necessary to meet the future challenge of sustainable energy with high efficiency and the exploration of new renewable resources, all for increasingly sustainable cities.