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\"People rarely stop to think about where the energy they use to power their everyday lives comes from and when they do it is often to ask a worried question: is mankind's energy usage killing the planet? How do we deal with nuclear waste? What happens when the oil runs out? Energy: The Basics answers these questions but it also does much more. In this engaging yet even-handed introduction, readers are introduced to: - the concept of 'energy' and what it really means - the ways energy is currently generated and the sources used - new and emerging energy technologies such as solar power and biofuels - the impacts of energy use on the environment including climate change Featuring explanatory diagrams, tables, a glossary and an extensive further reading list, this book is the ideal starting point for anyone interested in the impact and future of the world's energy supply. Harold Schobert is Professor of Fuel Science in the Department of Energy and Mineral Engineering at Penn State University. He is the author of Energy and Society 2nd Edition (CRC Press, 2011),\"-- Provided by publisher.

Investment on generation system and transmission network is an important issue in power systems, and investment reversibility closely depends on performing an optimal planning. In this regard, generation expansion planning (GEP) and transmission expansion planning (TEP) have been presented by researchers to manage an optimal planning on generation and transmission systems. In recent years, a large number of research works have been carried out on GEP and TEP. These problems have been investigated with different views, methods, constraints and objectives. The evaluation of researches in these fields and categorising their different aspects are necessary to manage further works. This study presents a comprehensive review of GEP and TEP problems from different aspects and views such as modelling, solving methods, reliability, distributed generation, electricity market, uncertainties, line congestion, reactive power planning, demand-side management and so on. The review results provide a comprehensive background to find out further ideas in these fields.

This book explains how water can generate energy and could become a viable alternative to fossil fuels.

Flow batteries, in which the electro-active components are held in fluid form external to the battery itself, are attractive as a potential means for regulating the output of intermittent renewable sources of electricity; an aqueous flow battery based on inexpensive commodity chemicals is now reported that also has the virtue of enabling further improvement of battery performance through organic chemical design. Go with the flow batteries Flow batteries differ from the conventional type in that the electro-active components of flow batteries are held in fluid form external to the battery itself, enabling such systems to store arbitrarily large amounts of energy. Flow batteries are therefore attractive as a potential means for regulating the output of intermittent sources of electricity such as wind or solar power. But an important limitation of most such systems is the abundance and cost of the electro-active materials. To overcome this limitation, Brian Huskinson and colleagues have developed an aqueous flow battery on the basis of inexpensive, non-metallic commodity chemicals, with the added advantage of enabling the tuning of key battery properties through chemical design. As the fraction of electricity generation from intermittent renewable sources—such as solar or wind—grows, the ability to store large amounts of electrical energy is of increasing importance. Solid-electrode batteries maintain discharge at peak power for far too short a time to fully regulate wind or solar power output 1 , 2 . In contrast, flow batteries can independently scale the power (electrode area) and energy (arbitrarily large storage volume) components of the system by maintaining all of the electro-active species in fluid form 3 , 4 , 5 . Wide-scale utilization of flow batteries is, however, limited by the abundance and cost of these materials, particularly those using redox-active metals and precious-metal electrocatalysts 6 , 7 . Here we describe a class of energy storage materials that exploits the favourable chemical and electrochemical properties of a family of molecules known as quinones. The example we demonstrate is a metal-free flow battery based on the redox chemistry of 9,10-anthraquinone-2,7-disulphonic acid (AQDS). AQDS undergoes extremely rapid and reversible two-electron two-proton reduction on a glassy carbon electrode in sulphuric acid. An aqueous flow battery with inexpensive carbon electrodes, combining the quinone/hydroquinone couple with the Br 2 /Br − redox couple, yields a peak galvanic power density exceeding 0.6 W cm −2 at 1.3 A cm −2 . Cycling of this quinone–bromide flow battery showed >99 per cent storage capacity retention per cycle. The organic anthraquinone species can be synthesized from inexpensive commodity chemicals 8 . This organic approach permits tuning of important properties such as the reduction potential and solubility by adding functional groups: for example, we demonstrate that the addition of two hydroxy groups to AQDS increases the open circuit potential of the cell by 11% and we describe a pathway for further increases in cell voltage. The use of π-aromatic redox-active organic molecules instead of redox-active metals represents a new and promising direction for realizing massive electrical energy storage at greatly reduced cost.

\"The increasing importance of biomass as a renewable energy source has led to an acute need for reliable and detailed information on its assessment, consumption and supply. Responding to this need, and overcoming the lack of standardised measurement and accounting procedures, this best-selling handbook provides the reader with the skills to understand the biomass resource base, the tools to assess the resource, and explores the pros and cons of exploitation. This new edition has been fully updated and revised with new chapters on sustainability methodologies. Topics covered include assessment methods for woody and herbaceous biomass, biomass supply and consumption, remote sensing techniques, food security, sustainability and certification as well as vital policy issues. The book includes international case studies on techniques from measuring tree volume to transporting biomass, which help to illustrate step-by-step methods. Technical appendices offer a glossary of terms, energy units and other valuable resource data. \"-- Provided by publisher.

This study proposes a secondary voltage and frequency control scheme based on the distributed cooperative control of multi-agent systems. The proposed secondary control is implemented through a communication network with one-way communication links. The required communication network is modelled by a directed graph (digraph). The proposed secondary control is fully distributed such that each distributed generator only requires its own information and the information of its neighbours on the communication digraph. Thus, the requirements for a central controller and complex communication network are obviated, and the system reliability is improved. The simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed secondary control for a microgrid test system.

\"This book explores the smart grid from generation to consumption; both as it is planned today and how it will likely evolve tomorrow\"-- Provided by publisher.

The scope of this study is the optimal siting and sizing of distributed generation within a power distribution network considering uncertainties. A probabilistic power flow (PPF)-embedded genetic algorithm (GA)-based approach is proposed in order to solve the optimisation problem that is modelled mathematically under a chance constrained programming framework. Point estimate method (PEM) is proposed for the solution of the involved PPF problem. The uncertainties considered include: (i) the future load growth in the power distribution system, (ii) the wind generation, (iii) the output power of photovoltaics, (iv) the fuel costs and (v) the electricity prices. Based on some candidate schemes of different distributed generation types and sizes, placed on specific candidate buses of the network, GA is applied in order to find the optimal plan. The proposed GA with embedded PEM (GA–PEM) is applied on the IEEE 33-bus network by considering several scenarios and is compared with the method of GA with embedded Monte Carlo simulation (GA–MCS). The main conclusions of this comparison are: (i) the proposed GA–PEM is seven times faster than GA–MCS, and (ii) both methods provide almost identical results.

It is expected that electric vehicles (EVs) will soon represent a large share of the demand for electricity. Several research works have extolled the advantages of these devices as flexible demands, not only to charge their batteries when it is cheaper to do so, but also to provide services in the form of vehicle-to-grid (V2G) power injections to the system. These services, however, could reduce the useful life of the battery and thus introduce a cost that needs to be taken into account when scheduling the charging of these vehicles. This study presents a scheduling algorithm for EVs under a real time pricing scheme with uncertainty. The objective function explicitly takes into account the cost of battery degradation not only when used to provide services to the system but also in terms of the EV utilisation for motion. The results show that the scheduling of the V2G services is sensitive to the electricity prices uncertainty and to the degradation costs derived from the energy arbitrage. Also, the optimal energy state of charge of the batteries is highly dependent on whether the cost of battery degradation is taken into account or not.