Solar Compass最新文献

The rapid growth in global energy demand in recent years has made global leaders think more about sustainability in the energy sector. Waste-to-energy (WTE) and solar energy are emerging areas in the energy sustainability discourse since terrestrial sustainability is of great concern. The study uses economic indices to evaluate the feasibility of WTE and solar plants at Oti landfill in Kumasi, Ghana, with the core objective of sustainable waste management through electricity production. Three scenarios were considered, (i) waste-to-energy plant alone, (ii) solar PV plant alone and (iii) combination of (i) and (ii) – hybrid. The Oti landfill receives a total volume of 891,000 tons per year of solid waste, which can be used to generate 379 GWh of electricity per year and has the potential to generate 85 GWh of electricity per year from solar with the assumption that one-half of the land surface area used waste to electricity and the other one-half is used for solar PV electricity. The study shows that all three scenarios are worth investing in, but the best investment option is the solar PV plant alone with NPV of mGHs 324.79, DPP of 4 years, IRR of 44% and DPI of 2.7. The WTE alone had NPV, IRR, DPI and DPP of mGHs 1122.11, 16%, 0.47 and 15.2 years, respectively. The WTE and solar PV composite had NPV of mGHs1445.9, IRR of 17%, DPI of 2.02 and the project initial cost recovery of 14.2 years.

This paper describes the processes and initial results for developing a Solar Roadmap for the Republic of Togo, West Africa. The activity followed the IEA/ISA procedure described in the “Solar Energy, Mapping the Road Ahead” document. The roadmap development committee included members from Togo, Europe, Asia, and the United States. The activity was initiated in 2020. The Togo Solar Roadmap development was divided into four Phases: Planning and preparation; Visioning; Roadmap Development; and Roadmap implementation and revision. The first 3 phases have been completed and are reported in this paper. The primary focus of the roadmap is on solar electricity and photovoltaics.

This paper provides a summary of the Annual World Solar Reports on Technology, Markets, and Investments published by the International Solar Alliance (ISA) in October 2022. Solar has emerged as the technology of choice to drive the renewable energy transition. This preference for solar has been driven by technology maturity and improvements, cost reductions, and improved methods for grid integration of solar generation. Globally, solar has grown nearly 20 fold in the last decade to reach 920 GW of installed capacity in 2021. As solar approaches and crosses into Terawatt scale of deployment, a number of technological innovations are emerging to continue improving generation efficiency, power output, and material consumption. Additionally, manufacturing capacity is growing rapidly to meet demand for installations. The market for solar installations continues to grow around the world but will need to scale rapidly to meet net zero requirements. The growth in solar markets will also require a significant scale up in solar investments across the world through a wide range of instruments. The deployment of the correct solar related interventions can ensure that the world can achieve multi terawatt scale of solar deployment in the coming decades, thus supporting the global energy transition.

All energy types consumed on Earth emanate from the Sun's photosphere, either directly or indirectly. The maximum potential of solar energy is based on direct normal irradiance from the sun. However, due to differences in the operation and production process of each system, instead of just direct normal irradiance, it is the maximum amount of radiation in any form available for the system. By introducing common platform based upon the concept of long term rating (LTR) and standard solar energy (SSE) platform, defined by the temperatures of the photosphere of the Sun and the average Earth's ambient, three practical solar harvesters were studied and compared in this paper. With such an approach, the efficacy of each solar system is compared meaningfully despite assorted optical and work or heat driven cycles were deployed. Citing the case of solar-powered seawater desalination example, the amount of standard solar energy (SSE) needed per m³ produced by the stationary photovoltaic (PV), concentrated photovoltaic (CPV), and concentrated solar power (CSP) systems are 6.49, 2.36, and 2.99, respectively. Despite the more efficient use of SSE per m³ by the CPV method, which is deemed technologically mature, yet the major trend for the investment of renewable solar systems, either willfully or ignorantly, is the least efficient solar PV. As sunlight availability per m² is finite, a causal approach is needed for sustainable solar desalination.

This short note describes the basics and the process of technology roadmapping and its use to accelerate the deployment of solar technologies, in particular for solar photovoltaic technologies and applications in yet untapped markets, regions and countries. It emphasizes the important role of the roadmapping process itself, namely the crucial relevance of the stakeholder dialogue when establishing the vision and the targets of the solar roadmap.

Energy generation in buildings is a reality in several countries. But to obtain the best aesthetics and energetic performance from the photovoltaics (PV) architectural integration, it is necessary to make essential decisions in the design stage. This paper aims to demonstrate how decision-making in the design phase of the PV design can take advantage of two tools that allow the designer to evaluate the use of solar irradiation and the impact of shading in different conditions of orientation and inclination: the solar abacus and the shading masks. The method introduced each tool and explained how they could be used to support and guide the definition of architectural design. Additionally, the critical decision-making points for each tool were highlighted, enabling better comprehension for decision-making. The method was applied in two case studies in the same residential building located in the South of Brazil: one PV system for a rooftop and another PV system for a solar carport. As a result of the application of this method, although the orientations and inclinations existing in the case study were not ideally oriented, it was still possible to respect them, creating a building-integrated photovoltaic system (BIPV) design that harmonized with the building and valued the integration of the PV in the architecture. Due to the simplicity of interpretation of the adopted tools, both architects not specialized in solar energy and end customers can understand the decision-making process and the resulting losses from each project choice.

Hydrogen energy has been assessed as a clean and renewable energy source for future energy demand. For harnessing hydrogen energy to its fullest potential, storage is a key parameter. It is well known that important hydrogen storage characteristics are operating pressure-temperature of hydrogen, hydrogen storage capacity, hydrogen absorption-desorption kinetics and heat transfer in the hydride bed. Each application needs specific properties. Every class of hydrogen storage materials has a different set of hydrogenation characteristics. Hence, it is required to understand the properties of all hydrogen storage materials. The present review is focused on the state-of–the–art hydrogen storage materials including metal hydrides, magnesium-based materials, complex hydride systems, carbonaceous materials, metal organic frameworks, perovskites and materials and processes based on artificial intelligence. In each category of materials’ discovery, hydrogen storage mechanism and reaction, crystal structure and recent progress have been discussed in detail. Together with the fundamental synthesis process, latest techniques of material tailoring like nanostructuring, nanoconfinement, catalyzing, alloying and functionalization have also been discussed. Hydrogen energy research has a promising potential to replace fossil fuels from energy uses, especially from automobile sector. In this context, efforts initiated worldwide for clean hydrogen production and its use via fuel cell in vehicles is much awaiting steps towards sustainable energy demand.

New analysis is presented identifying strong potential for Concentrating Solar Thermal technology (CST) to be a cost-effective contributor to future sources of net zero-emissions, high temperature industrial process heat relative to other emerging options. Nevertheless, significant further development of the technology is needed to realise this potential because the majority of previous investment in CST has targeted lower temperature applications in power generation, which employs different working fluids and typically operates at different scales. A comparison with the flame temperatures typically employed in current industrial processes, together with an allowance for thermal storage, suggests that receiver temperatures in the range of 1100 − 1500 °C will be needed to drive many current high-temperature industrial processes, which is far above the range of temperatures employed commercially and also above the range at which most pilot-scale work for CST has been undertaken to date. Technology development will therefore be needed to realise this potential, both for the solar thermal plant and for the industrial processing plant, since current reactors have been developed to utilise fossil fuels. More work is also needed to advance understanding of the best options with which to hybridise CST with another back-up energy source, such as hydrogen, since it is uneconomical to seek to manage seasonal variability with thermal storage alone.

A case study is then presented of the techno-economic performance of a system based on the solar expanding-vortex receiver, which has proven potential to operate at the required temperature range and also employs air as the Heat Transfer Media (HTM) to facilitate integration into existing industrial processes. This analysis summarises the first major assessment of a fully integrated system that considers the full path from the solar plant to the industrial processes with thermal storage and combustion back-up, using a transient model that accounts for one year of resource variability in 15 min time intervals. The complexity of the system is compounded by the interdependence of the performance of each component, whichmakes it challenging to optimise. For example, the costs of integrating the solar thermal output to the industrial plant can be comparable with that of the heliostat field for a single tower at scales of 50MWth. However, the relative cost of integration decreases with an increase in thermal scale. Importantly, the best of these systems is found to have good potential to provide cost-competitive Levelised Cost of Heat (LCOH) compared with projected costs for other options for net-zero heat, notably green electrical power and hydrogen with storage, provided that the solar resource is good. Furthermore, it is anticipated that further reductions in LCOH will be possible, both with further system optimisation and with future technology development, such as that employing alternative HTM includ