Solar Compass最新文献

Solar energy democratizes energy access. It also has helped address price volatility that is typically associated with the use of imported fossil fuels and has received prominence particularly during crisis periods including oil price shocks. Countries such as Sri Lanka and Bangladesh took the lead to scale up the use of solar home systems in the 90’s providing income generation and social development in rural areas. A new cycle of solar development has taken place over the last 15 years propelled by the use of enabling policy and regulatory instruments, ramping up of solar manufacturing capacity in People’s Republic of China, the scaling up of clean projects through models such as solar parks that took off in India and replicated in other Asian countries including Cambodia. The declining cost of solar power coupled with the mobilization of long tenor concessional public financing (including multilateral support) has helped address key risks and crowd in private capital to the sector. Over time, there is a focus on energy storage for better utilization of solar power as well as offer value added services including for heat and water production, transport sector decarbonization and now green hydrogen. This expands the use case for solar power permitting it to play a more prominent role in meeting energy requirements in the region and particularly in the context of NDC commitments. Policy and regulatory instruments would also need to evolve to help meet these newer and more ambitious deployment plans.

Transportation fuels are a major contributor to the global carbon emissions and must be tackled in order to achieve the goal of net zero carbon emissions. Although electric automobiles and other surface transportation are the focus of many governments, aviation fuels will continue to be a problem, unless they can be produced sustainably. High temperature thermochemical processes can be used to convert the atmospheric carbon dioxide and water to sustainable liquid aviation fuels using solar energy.

In this article we have briefly reviewed inventions, innovations, and commercialization prospects of solar thermochemical fuels. Also, we have highlighted the opportunities and prominent attempts for commercialization and identified the related challenges. This article reviews and analyzes recent progress and innovations in the materials and system developments. The review is followed by a list of notable recent patents and articles. However, the list is by no means exhaustive or complete and quite possibly some important patents and articles might be missing. However, the review and the lists support the objective of this section to draw attention to the topic of inventions, innovations and new technologies, which can be a major contributor to the global goal of net zero carbon emissions in the world.

Global energy demand for space cooling is growing very fast. In the emerging economies, building construction is projected to be a very intense activity in the coming years. This would mainly be driven by increasing population, growing wealth, rising aspirations of an improved lifestyle and rapid pace of urbanization. These countries are mostly in tropical and warm climatic region. The prevailing temperatures in these countries make space cooling a necessity. This will trigger a dramatic increase in the demand for cooling. As a result, building energy consumption and related greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions will continue to rise at a very high rate. If immediate appropriate measures are not taken, the state of technologies and the GHG emissions will be locked in for many decades. This paper discusses the existing space cooling technologies and their suitability to provide comfort cooling in the context of warm and humid climates. The low carbon alternatives for space cooling have been reviewed, and the strategies that can be adopted to reduce cooling loads and carbon emissions have been deliberated. Building sector in warm and tropical climate has significant untapped potential, and therefore offers a potential means for decarbonization. Relevant policies adopted and implemented in a country will play the major role.

Decarbonizing the energy sector and electrifying buildings and transportation requires the rapid and cost-efficient build-out of solar, energy storage, demand management, and other distributed energy resources (DERs). Many jurisdictions have recognized the critical importance of DERs to the clean energy transition and are developing solutions to enable the more rapid and cost-efficient integration of DERs onto the electric grid. At the same time, as the scale and speed of DER deployment grows, more challenges are emerging, including lengthy interconnection timelines, costly grid upgrades, and regulatory and technical barriers to enabling the variety of benefits DERs can provide to the grid.

Interconnection, in particular, can pose a significant challenge to growing DER penetration. Interconnection rules and regulations spell out the procedural and technical requirements for connecting DERs to the grid. When these rules are well-designed, they can support faster and more cost-effective DER integration, but when they are outdated or poorly designed, they can slow or even halt DER growth.

This article describes some of the key challenges that U.S. states are facing with DER interconnection to the distribution system, and highlights leading solutions to address those challenges. While the article focuses on DER interconnection rules and regulations in the United States, many of the lessons learned and solutions are likely applicable to other jurisdictions that are experiencing rapid DER market growth.

The production of syngas by simultaneous splitting of direct-air-captured CO₂ and H₂O via a solar thermochemical redox cycle is a competitive alternative to electrolysis-based pathways. Isothermal or near-isothermal operation using high-entropy oxides that are readily available, robust, and flowable is recommended on the basis of practical considerations and improved performance, both mechanical and thermodynamic. Ongoing research efforts should direct attention toward devising compatible thermal energy storage technologies and/or incorporating hybrid solar-electric heating to (1) mitigate the effects of solar intermittency and (2) provide a continuous feed for downstream gas-to-liquid processing. The path forward involves funding the development and characterization of fully integrated laboratory systems.

The mini-grid market in Africa is steadily growing and solar PV, wind, hydro or biomass-powered mini-grids are expected to be a major factor in the electrification of rural areas. However, mini-grid markets cannot realize their full potential as most energy regulators do not provide an appropriate answer to the simple question “What happens when the main grid arrives?”. The lack of regulatory security of tenure and potentially subsidized tariffs for main grid-sourced electricity risk stranded investments when the main grid arrives and thus threaten private sector participation and investment.

Effective grid encroachment regulations should provide adequate (i) technical requirements, (ii) legal protection, (iii) variety of business models for the post encroachment period, (iv) financial compensation mechanisms for mini-grids, and (v) protection of customer interests upon changes of supplier, should this result from grid encroachment. The research developed a set of objective benchmarks for the above five categories and tests the effectiveness of mini-grid encroachment regulations of 24 African nations against these benchmarks.

The inter-comparison study amongst grid encroachment regulations highlights the gaps in existing regulations of the African countries. It demonstrates that Zambia meets 80% of the developed benchmarks while most other nations lag significantly in offering fair treatment to mini-grid investors in case of grid encroachment. The findings also demonstrate that Zambian regulations have potential usefulness for other countries in and outside Africa to further develop or streamline mini-grid encroachment approaches and regulations towards workable regulatory frameworks that could contribute towards achieving a world-wide goal of 100% renewables.