A Review of the Key Technical and Non-Technical Challenges for Sustainable Transportation Electrification: A Case for Urban Catenary Buses

The transport sector has been increasing rather than decreasing its CO2 emissions, and its sustainable electrification faces a number of technical and non-technical challenges. This paper investigates these challenges, namely those of the grid load demand modelling, renewables integration, the present infrastructure limitations, and the...

Combined Airborne Wind and Photovoltaic Energy System for Martian Habitats

Generating renewable energy on Mars is technologically challenging. Firstly, because, compared to Earth, key energy resources such as solar and wind are weak as a result of very low atmospheric pressure and low solar irradiation. Secondly, because of the harsh environmental conditions, the required high degree of automation, and the exceptional...

Pig Farming vs. Solar Farming: Exploring Novel Opportunities for the Energy Transition

Amsterdam aims to bring down its carbon footprint by 55% in 2030 and by 95% in 2050. For the built environment, plotted pathways towards carbon neutrality primarily revolve around the reduction of fossil based energy demand and the transition towards renewable energy production strategies. The consumption of food resources, and its significant...

Assessment of Current Energy Consumption in Residential Buildings in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

In the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), residential buildings' energy consumption accounts for almost 50% of the building stock electricity consumption. The KSA's economy relies heavily on fossil fuel sources, namely oil reservoirs, whose depletion will negatively affect the future development of the country. The total electricity consumption is...

Unravelling the practical solar charging performance limits of redox flow batteries based on a single photon device system

In recent years, solar redox flow batteries have attracted attention as a possible integrated technology for simultaneous conversion and storage of solar energy. Unlike solar water splitting technologies which require at least 1.8V for meaningful performance, a lesson learned from previous solar redox flow battery (SRFB) studies is that even...

Coolfacade: Architectural Integration of Solar Cooling Technologies in the Building Envelope

Increasing cooling demands in the built environment present an important and complex challenge for the design of sustainable buildings and cities. Even though the first course of action should always aim to reduce energy consumption through saving measures and passive design; these are often not enough to avoid mechanical equipment altogether,...

Designing Sustainable Energy for All: Sustainable Product-Service System Design Applied to Distributed Renewable Energy

This open access book addresses the issue of diffusing sustainable energy access in low- and middle-income contexts.<br/><br/>Access to energy is one of the greatest challenges for many people living in low-<br/>income and developing contexts, as around 1.4 billion people lack access to electricity. <br/>Distributed Renewable Energy systems (DRE...

Quantifying urban energy potentials: Presenting three european research projects

Although more than half of the world’s population now lives in cities, this trend is expected to continue and there is an increasing awareness of the need to move to a fully sustainable urban energy system, this transition process is still significantly lagging behind in many places. The yield of many renewable energy sources is directly related...