Energy Efficiency最新文献

With the advent of Industry 4.0, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has created a favorable environment for the digitalization of manufacturing and processing, helping industries to automate and optimize operations. In this work, we focus on a practical case study of a brake caliper quality control operation, which is usually accomplished by human inspection and requires a dedicated handling system, with a slow production rate and thus inefficient energy usage. We report on a developed Machine Learning (ML) methodology, based on Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (D-CNNs), to automatically extract information from images, to automate the process. A complete workflow has been developed on the target industrial test case. In order to find the best compromise between accuracy and computational demand of the model, several D-CNNs architectures have been tested. The results show that, a judicious choice of the ML model with a proper training, allows a fast and accurate quality control; thus, the proposed workflow could be implemented for an ML-powered version of the considered problem. This would eventually enable a better management of the available resources, in terms of time consumption and energy usage.

Germany needs to steeply increase the rate of deep energy-efficiency renovation of its old buildings, to meet climate goals. The government has long maintained that deep renovation to a specified “minimum” energy efficiency standard is economically viable: that the costs are paid back, through energy savings, over the technical lifetime of the energy-efficiency measures. Many private and public organisations support and promulgate this view. It accords with a stream of academic literature which suggests that the under-adoption of energy efficiency measures is a paradox indicating market failures and economically irrational behaviour by property owners. This paper offers cost–benefit analyses of 44 case study scenarios to test whether deep renovation in Germany pays back in monetary terms. These include both specific buildings and Germany-wide averages of classes of buildings. It uses current construction, finance and energy costs, and takes account of inflation, discount rates and opportunity costs. None of the scenarios are economically viable in monetary terms, and the average payback after 25 years is around 22.5%. Sensitivity analyses suggest payback would only be achieved using improbable parameter values. Energy-efficiency renovation is necessary but promoting it needs to take account of these realities.

The global building sector, responsible for over 30% of CO₂ emissions, necessitates urgent decarbonization efforts. This paper examines residential building decarbonization policies in three major economies—the European Union (EU), China, and India. It provides an overview of diverse policies through policy landscape analysis and delves into the design specifics with a detailed policy intensity analysis of building energy codes, information disclosure, and financial incentives in each region. Our findings reveal a diverse mix of policies targeting residential building decarbonization in all three regions. While the EU and China have long-established diverse policy instruments, India's building energy efficiency policies are relatively recent and limited. Detailed analyses of building energy codes, information disclosure, and financial incentives expose variations in ambition, scope, and implementation, even with shared policy instruments. Significant advancements in building energy codes, particularly in stringency and compliance checks, are evident in the EU and China. Conversely, India faces a notable obstacle with limited adoption of residential building energy codes, impacting its journey towards net-zero. The EU leads in building energy labelling policies, while China and India encounter various challenges hindering widespread implementation. Financial incentives across the three regions predominantly take the form of subsidies, potentially straining public budgets. The study concludes with reflections on the pressing need for future research extending beyond the operational phase of buildings.

Decision-makers want to be reliably advised on the implications of the decisions they make. Very sophisticated models, which decision-makers are often unfamiliar with, are typically used to provide such assessments for large and complex systems. However, even having access to these models, decision-makers can rarely handle them. A model is best known to its developers, who, therefore, need to be contracted to estimate the effects of the proposed policies. This takes time and money, yet leaves the credibility of the results questionable in countries with a limited culture of cooperation between decision-makers and a modeling community. One possible, yet partial, solution is to use an ensemble of models. Another option is to use a set of compact meta-models to address specific policies and measures; the parameters of such compact models can be assessed using other, large and complex, models. Decision-makers can run these simple compact models on their own to make policy dialogue more operational and to have more confidence in the results. This paper presents one such model, which consists of 95 compact sub-models designed to outline comprehensive energy efficiency programs, along with the results of its pilot application for an illustrative set of policies. This application has shown, that such models may serve as an effective tool for a prompt policy dialogue with all stakeholders in compiling the policy package to untap the most of the available energy efficiency potential to meet sector-specific or economy-wide goals in terms of energy savings or energy intensity reduction.

Efficient energy demand management in the residential sector must be designed based on a sufficient understanding of factors. This study focuses on apartments, a mainstream housing type in Korea. The combination of factor analysis and quantile regression analysis provides insight into the sociocultural meaning of home appliance ownership and use pattern and the differential impact on electricity consumption. The eight representative home appliances closely related to electricity consumption in the household sector are related to household composition, life cycle, economic ability, education, and occupation type. Additionally, the influence of home appliances on electricity consumption is not constant and is differentiated depending on the consumption level of each household. These attempts can provide customized information on specific housing type groups emerging in the future economic development and urban development process. In residential energy demand management, further segmentation and specification of the target and content of information provision will increase the effectiveness of policy achievement.

The transition to renewable energy systems is a comprehensive and challenging process requiring broad public support. Solar energy citizenship, a form of renewable energy prosumerism, is an expression of energy citizenship for implementing a sustainable energy transition. This study examined the effects of four behavioral beliefs (i.e., consumer innovativeness, impure altruism [warm glow], social-based public engagement, and solar product knowledge) on consumer intention and attitudes about solar energy citizenship. Furthermore, this study explored how perceived government incentives moderate the relationship between attitudes and intentions related to solar energy citizenship. Convenience sampling was employed for data acquisition. An anonymous questionnaire was distributed online to participants, and 370 valid responses were collected in Taiwan. The results indicated that the four aforementioned behavioral beliefs positively influenced the respondents’ attitudes toward solar energy citizenship. We discovered that their attitudes toward solar energy citizenship services were positively associated with their behavioral intention to use such services. Perceived government incentives moderated the relationship between the respondents’ attitudes and behavioral intention toward using solar energy citizenship services. These findings propose several suggestions for governments, relevant agencies, and solar energy service providers.

The expansion of renewable energy (RE) technology could be assisted by energy policies that tackle significant barriers. Several obstacles have slowed the RE sector’s growth in developing nations, leading to less-than-ideal development in this area. Moreover, exploring potential alternate strategies to surmount these constraints has received limited attention. It is essential to identify the barriers preventing the use of RE technologies before proposing an adequate replacement to tackle these issues appropriately. Hence, the present research aspires to identify and prioritize the obstacles currently impeding the advancement of RE technologies in developing countries, using the spherical fuzzy analytical hierarchy approach. The results suggest that the “Policy and political” category (0.1769) has the highest ranking among the main groups, followed by “Economic” (0.1647), “Administration & regulatory” (0.1640), and “Technology” (0.1438), respectively. The market barriers, with a weight of (0.1333), exhibit the lowest weight among the various factors considered. Similarly, the geographical and ecological barriers, with a weight of (0.1170), and the social and cultural barriers, with a weight of (0.1003), all have relatively lower weights. In contrast, the comprehensive global rankings of sub-obstacles indicate that the lack of a sufficient market base (0.05419), transportation problems (0.04375), and a lack of local entrepreneurship (0.04243) are the three most notable sub-obstacles among the remaining thirty-five obstacles across diverse categories. Moreover, recommendations are provided for the eradication of the obstacles. Furthermore, it is essential to consider the possible advantages of devising approaches to indorse the effective execution of RE projects in developing nations.

The fast growth of building constructions industry and of the universal population is the main cause of increase in global energy consumption. Therefore, the improvement of the building envelope encourages the scientific community to investigate the use of alternative materials that assure indoor comfort conditions and at the same time promote the reduction of energy consumption by adopting energy saving strategies in the manufacturing process. The present research contribution aims to focus on the potential use of innovative building materials developed with waste paper, classified as urban non-hazardous discard component. The use of paper pulp originated from recycled paper and cardboard with the addition of textile fibers from industrial by-products was explored. Here, an effort has been made to realize sustainable insulating panel for internal use, considering different mix design and recycled components in various percentages. The research focuses on hygric, thermal, and physical performances of recycled waste based panels, measuring physical aspects as bulk porosity and bulk density and testing hygrothermal performances as the dry-state thermal conductivity, thermal diffusivity, volumetric heat capacity, and water vapour permeability. Furthermore, in order to assess the hygrothermal behaviour of the building envelope, a numerical simulation, carried out by WUFI® Plus in a Mediterranean context, was developed using as inputs the results collected from the measurement campaign in laboratory.

In this study, 11 provinces with more than 1 MW solar power plants (SPP) in Turkey have been examined in terms of global solar radiation and power produced. The main objective of this study is to underline the serious differences in technical feasibility analysis conducted by the academic circles and solar energy industrial environments in Turkey. The obtained results were compared with the values operated by the private installation companies in the industry, these were interpreted, and the disagreements were revealed. Moreover, the study reveals some gaps in technical feasibility analysis, which the sector professionals usually ignore in the field. The findings were evaluated in monthly, annual, and seasonal time zones. The present study showed that the analysis, to which private companies in the field refer, is insufficient and the parameters that would guide the investor in detail could not be obtained. More detailed prospection has been obtained within the scope of this study.

Considering the whole of our findings, while the most advantageous location for investing in SPPs in Antalya with a total of 97.50 h monthly average sunshine duration and radiation of 59,599.6 W/m² throughout the year, the most disadvantaged location is Kahramanmaraş with a total monthly average sunshine duration of 80.80 h and a radiation value of 44,810.8 W/m²-year. Antalya is followed by Mardin location (monthly average sunshine duration of 96.10 h and radiation of 59,487.9 W/m²-year) and Karaman (monthly average sunshine duration of 94.40 h and radiation of 58,847.1 W/m²-year).

Industrial symbiosis (IS) is known as an effective strategy to reduce resource consumption. Recently, the utilization of efficient energy conversion technologies in symbiotic relations has been suggested to enhance the flow exchange efficiency and economic effectiveness of energy-based industrial symbiosis schemes. In this work, the possibility of improving industrial symbiosis between agricultural greenhouses and waste heat sources in industries is investigated by utilizing the organic Rankine cycle (ORC) in different configurations. For this aim, a modelling tool is developed to analyse the thermo-economic justification of energy-based industrial symbiosis and estimate the possibility of simultaneous waste heat utilization for power generation and greenhouse heating. The results show that the selection of working fluid, capacity and configuration has a significant effect on the successful implementation of ORC technology and can reduce the payback period time to less than 5 years for the proposed case study. However, results indicate that even using an optimized ORC system is not always accompanied by improving the economic effectiveness and justification of IS establishment.