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This study reports a board game design that would be an effective tool for teaching and learning the best mix of national power sources in a class concerning energy and sustainability in higher education courses. A board game was developed to understand the characteristics of power sources from a Japanese viewpoint based on an earlier study of the authors. The purpose of the game is to satisfy electricity demands by choosing power sources and procuring the resources necessary for power generation to help develop a country. A total of 50 undergraduate and graduate students were asked to assess the game. The results of the questionnaire-based survey conducted after the game confirmed the students’ evaluation that the game was highly enjoyable and could serve as an effective tool for energy and environmental education in high schools or universities. In addition, the average of “the ratio of the power sources proper to win the game” given by the students was similar to Japanese power mix before the Fukushima disaster, although the game significantly simplified, and even excluded, various factors affecting the national policy of power sources.

<p>With the transition to liberalized electricity markets in many countries, the shift to more environmentally sustainable forms of power generation and increasing penetration of electric vehicles and smart appliances, a fundamental understanding of the economic principles underpinning the electricity industry is vital. Using clarity and precision, the authors successfully explain economic theory of all liberalized electricity market types from a cross-disciplinary engineering and policy perspective. No prior engineering knowledge or economics expertise is assumed in introducing key ideas such as nodal pricing, optimal dispatch and efficient pricing or in extending those models to areas including investment, risk management and the handling of contingencies.</p> <p>Key features:</p> <ul> <li>Comprehensively covers the principles of all liberalized electricity market types, including the US, Europe, New Zealand and Australia.</li> <li>Provides up to date coverage of research and policy issues, including design of financial transmission rights, modeling of market power, problems of regional pricing, and design of distribution pricing to facilitate Smart Grid.</li> <li>Spans introductory material to cutting-edge thinking on risk-management and short-run dispatch.</li> <li>Supports independent learning and teaching with worked examples and problems, enabling the reader to test and further deepen their understanding, whilst also promoting their insight and intuition.</li> <li>Solutions to problems and figures are hosted on a companion website.&#160;</li> </ul> <p>This ground-breaking text is an indispensable resource for the next generation of engineers, economists and policy-makers in or preparing to enter the electricity sector. Graduate students in electrical engineering and economics will benefit from the breadth of material and detailed, economically precise presentation.</p>

The long-term anticipation of electricity supply (ELS) and demand has supposed substantial prominence in the elementary investigation to offer sustainable resolutions to electricity matters. In this editorial, an outline of the organization of the electricity segment of Pakistan and analysis of historical supply and demand statistics, an up-to-date position of the contrary set of energy plans is presented. The intention of this analysis is to explore the Granger causality relationship between electricity supply and economic growth (EG) by using a multivariate context with time series statistics covering 1990 to 2015 in Pakistan. Augmented dickey-fuller (ADF) and Philips-Perron (PP) unit root tests indicate that variables are non-stationary and integrated in a similar order (1). Our findings also reveal that variables economic growths (GDP), electricity supply (ELS), investment (INV), and export (EX) are co-integrated. The study also finds the Granger causality runs from EG to ELS deprived of any feedback effect. Therefore, the policy implications from our findings indicate that electricity preservation strategies may be implemented without any economic adverse impacts.

PurposeThe long-term marginal electricity supply mixes of 40 countries were generated and integrated into version 3.4 of the ecoinvent consequential database. The total electricity production originating from these countries accounts for 77% of the current global electricity generation. The goal of this article is to provide an overview of the methodology used to calculate the marginal mixes and to evaluate the influence of key parameters and methodological choices on the results.MethodsThe marginal mixes are based on public energy projections from national and international authorities and reflect the accumulated effect of changes in demand for electricity on the installation and operation of new-generation capacities. These newly generated marginal mixes are first examined in terms of their compositions and environmental impacts. They are then compared to several sets of alternative electricity supply mixes calculated using different methodological choices or data sources.Results and discussionRenewable energy sources (RES) as well as natural gas power plants show the highest growth rates and usually dominate the marginal mixes. Nevertheless, important variations may exist between the marginal mixes of the different countries in terms of their technological compositions and environmental impacts. The examination of the modeling choices reveals substantial variations between the marginal mixes integrated into the ecoinvent consequential database version 3.4 and marginal mixes generated using alternative modeling options. These different modeling possibilities include changes in the methodology, temporal parameters, and the underlying energy scenarios. Furthermore, in most of the impact categories, average (i.e., attributional) mixes cause higher impact scores than marginal mixes due to higher shares of RES in marginal mixes.ConclusionsAccurate and consistent data for electricity supply is integrated into a consequential database providing a strong basis for the development of consequential Life Cycle Assessments. The methodology adopted in this version of the database eliminates several shortcomings from the previous approach which led to unrealistic marginal mixes in several countries. The use of energy scenarios allows the evolution of the electricity system to be considered within the definition of the marginal mixes. The modeling choices behind the electricity marginal mix should be adjusted to the goal and scope of individual studies and their influence on the results evaluated.

We investigate heat waves defined as periods of at least 3 consecutive days of extremely high daily maximum temperature affecting at least 30 % of western Europe. This definition has been chosen to select heat waves that might impact western European electricity supply. Even though not all such heat waves threaten it, the definition allows to identify a sufficient number of events, the strongest being potentially harmful. The heat waves are characterised by their duration, spatial extent, intensity and severity. The heat wave characteristics are calculated for historical and future climate based on results of climate model simulations conducted during the 5th Phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5). The uncertainty of future anthropogenic forcing is taken into account by analysing results for the Representative Concentration Pathway scenarios RCP2.6, RCP4.5 and RCP8.5. The historical simulations are evaluated against the EOBS gridded station data. The CMIP5 ensemble median captures well the observed mean heat wave characteristics. However, no model simulates a heat wave as severe as observed during August 2003. Under future climate conditions, the heat waves become more frequent and have higher mean duration, extent and intensity. The ensemble spread is larger than the scenario uncertainty. The shift of the temperature distribution is more important for the increase of the cumulative heat wave severity than the broadening of the temperature distribution. However, the broadening leads to an amplification of the cumulative heat wave severity by a factor of 1.7 for RCP4.5 and 1.5 for RCP8.5.

The challenges of ensuring the security of electricity supply (SoES) in large aluminium smelters—particularly those that are self-supplied—provide a compelling rationale for further investigation, as research on this class of industrial systems is limited. Firstly, this paper presents an expert technical perspective on the distinct characteristics and operational challenges associated with aluminium potline loads and their supply systems in self-supplied aluminium smelters. This study then examines the supply infrastructure at Emirates Global Aluminium’s plant in Dubai, which has an installed power generation capacity of 3000 MW, supplying a 2000 MW load on a continuous basis through a network of three 132 kV substations. This high-voltage network is modelled and simulated using the CYME network analysis software module. We consider the following key approaches to ensure stable system voltage for desirable SoES: steady-state voltage control, outage planning and reactive power reserve management, active power flow management and load participation. We then study the influence each of these has on the system voltage and, hence, on the overall SoES of the smelter, using time-domain voltage and frequency curves at key network nodes and active power flow through important network interconnectors. The simulation results clearly demonstrate a significant improvement in the base case event by positively damping the oscillations in these responses, highlighting the significance of maintaining a healthy system voltage within a limit of ±2% of the nominal voltage to ensure SoES of the smelter.

Electricity supply transition to reach carbon neutrality in Europe is expected to bring air quality and health co-benefits, but their regional distribution has not been investigated in detail. This study quantifies these co-benefits for 250 European electricity scenarios in 2035 across 296 sub-national regions. The study links a spatially-explicit electricity sector model with an air quality and health impact model and then accounts for susceptibility and vulnerability of populations to adverse health effects. In case of low-carbon transition, direct PM2.5 concentrations attributable to European electricity generation in 2035 could be reduced by 45–99% compared to a system with the generation capacities of 2018. Depending on the system’s make-up, health co-benefits can vary significantly, as does their regional distribution. Focus on the minimum system costs leads to 15 times higher continent-wide excess deaths and to higher regional inequality than the scenario with minimum air pollutant emissions, which would almost entirely eliminate PM2.5-related mortality attributable to electricity generation. The most vulnerable regions (Balkans, Northern Germany, Southeast France, and the West Midlands in England) would benefit from higher air quality co-benefits than the continental average.

Diverse opportunities and environmental impacts could occur from a potential move towards waste-to-energy (WtE) systems for electricity generation from municipal solid waste (MSW) in Lagos and Abuja, Nigeria. Given this, the purpose of this study is to use life cycle assessment (LCA) as a primary analytical approach in order to undertake a comparative analysis from an environmental impact perspective of different WtE scenarios, along with diesel backup generators (DBGs) and grid electricity. A functional unit of 1 kilowatt-hour of electricity produced was used in assessing the following environmental impact categories: abiotic depletion (fossil fuels) potential (ADP), global warming potential (GWP 100a), human toxicity potential (HTP), photochemical oxidation potential (POCP), acidification potential (AP), and eutrophication potential (EP). The overall result indicated that anaerobic digestion (AD) had the highest energy generated per one tonne of MSW processed for both Lagos (683 kWh/t) and Abuja (667 kWh/t), while landfill gas to energy (LFGTE) had the lowest for both (Lagos 171 kWh/t, Abuja 135 kWh/t). AD also had the lowest environmental impacts amongst the four WtE systems for both cities based on all the impact categories except for POCP. In contrast, LFGTE had the highest impact in all the categories except ADP and HTP. Extending the analysis to include diesel-based generators (DBG) and grid electricity saw the DBGs having the highest impact overall in ADP (14.1 MJ), HTP (0.0732 Kg, 1.4 DB eq), AP (0.0129 Kg SO2 eq), and EP (0.00313 Kg PO4 eq) and grid electricity having the lowest impact in GWP (0.497 Kg CO2 eq), AP (0.000296 Kg SO2 eq), and EP (0.000061 Kg PO4 eq). It was concluded that additional electricity supply from AD to the grid, with its potential to reduce the reliance on DBGs (worst scenario overall), would be a positive action in environmental impact terms.