The papers in this collection have originated from Britain, Eastern and Western Europe and India, with the delegates coming from fifteen countries, including a strong contingent from Japan. This indicates a widespread interest in the application of heat pumps. The heat pump suffers from an environmental dichotomy. On the one hand it saves fossil fuel energy, thereby reducing CO emissions. On the other hand, in the vapour compression form, 2 it generally employs CFCs which are destructive to our protective ozone layer as well as contributing to the greenhouse effect. Taking the first, heat pumps, perhaps have the widest application numerically in the heating (and cooling) of buildings and an excellent paper describes case studies concerning three large Norwegian hotels. In these, heat was pumped from the adjacent river or sea when heating was required, and during the summer, when cooling became necessary, to generate domestic hot water. The heat pumps were installed by SINTEF Refrigeration Engineering, Norway, and have demonstrated payback periods of about two years. The fractional total energy saving of the three hotels was 30% as a result, an impressive figure, indeed. A similar paper by a Belgian architectural consortium shows how this technique can be successfully applied to the cooling of a large television complex where considerable quantities of heat were being generated by the luminaries. In this exercise the cooling load was successfully pumped to provide hot water.

Thin Film Metal-Oxides provides a representative account of the fundamental structure-property relations in oxide thin films. Functional properties of thin film oxides are discussed in the context of applications in emerging electronics and renewable energy technologies. Readers will find a detailed description of deposition and characterization of metal oxide thin films, theoretical treatment of select properties and their functional performance in solid state devices, from leading researchers. Scientists and engineers involved with oxide semiconductors, electronic materials and alternative energy will find Thin Film Metal-Oxides a useful reference.

This book provides a concise review of the thermo-physical phenomena which regulate heat and moisture transportation in Nearly Zero Energy Buildings envelopes, and their relationship with the growth of biological organisms.

It describes the main microorganisms proliferating on contemporary building elements and within buildings. It also states the consequences of biological growth on durability, aesthetics and human health; and provides the main methods for the analytical and experimental evaluation of proliferation.

Finally, through the review of recent developments, remedial actions to counter the biological phenomenon are examined, and an outline is provided for future innovations in a field not yet widely investigated.

to increase the use of direct contact processes, the National Science Foundation sup ported a workshop on direct contact heat transfer at the Solar Energy Research Insti tute in the summer of 1985. We served as organizers for this workshop, which em phasized an area of thermal engineering that, in our opinion, has great promise for the future, but has not yet reached the point of wide-spread commercial application. Hence, a summary of the state of knowledge at this point is timely. The workshop had a dual objective: 1. To summarize the current state of knowledge in such a form that industrial practi tioners can make use of the available information. 2. To indicate the research and development needed to advance the state-of-the-art, indicating not only what kind of research is needed, but also the industrial poten tial that could be realized if the information to be obtained through the proposed research activities were available.

Given the widespread use of real-time multitasking systems, there are tremendous optimization opportunities if reconfigurable computing can be effectively incorporated while maintaining performance and other design constraints of typical applications. The focus of this book is to describe the dynamic reconfiguration techniques that can be safely used in real-time systems. This book provides comprehensive approaches by considering synergistic effects of computation, communication as well as storage together to significantly improve overall performance, power, energy and temperature.

Minimizing Energy Consumption, Energy Poverty and Global and Local Climate Change in the Built Environment: Innovating to Zero analyzes three major issues of the built environment, including the political, economic and technical contexts, the impacts of global and local climate change, and the technical and social characteristics of energy poverty. In addition, the book addresses the causes and reasons for the magnitude and characteristics of the built environment's energy consumption. Users will find a fresh view of energy consumption in the built environment, especially in relation to energy poverty and climate change from the ZERO energy world perspective.

This book attempts to explain what went wrong in California's restructured energy markets and what must be done to restore California's economy and build new electricity systems. The intention here is to reconcile the principles of competition and regulation. California had a severe electricity crisis for about thirteen months beginning in May of 2000. The economic consequences and political fallout that arose from this crisis persist. California's economy continues to suffer and the state's treasury is deeply in debt. The state's three investor-owned utilities were nearly financially decimated. San Diego Gas & Electric has recovered to a greater degree than the other two only because its retail prices are about three times the national average and, for a time, well above the other two IOUs in California. Southern California Edison has recently been restored to investment grade and was granted a rate increase. Pacific Gas & Electric is emerging from bankruptcy. This book discusses all of this in greater detail. The problems and consequences arising from California's ill-fated foray into electricity market restructuring could damage the state for years to come. Challenges of this nature are not new to the Golden State. In the past, as we explain here, pragmatic, not entrenched, approaches have worked best in California. If California is to relatively quickly restore its previous enviable economic vitality and recover from the damage done to tarnish its luster, pragmatic approaches must again be used.

Turkey has been reforming its energy markets since the 1980s, culminating in two major bills in the early 2000s. The country has restructured electricity and natural gas markets, establishing an independent regulatory agency (EMRA) and passed legislation on renewable and nuclear energy. With these regulatory reforms, Turkey, as a candidate country for accession to the European Union (EU), has aimed to direct the energy markets to a more competitive environment in parallel with EU energy directives. This book contains an analysis of regulatory reforms in Turkish energy markets (electricity, natural gas, renewable and nuclear energy), the impact of these reforms on country's energy portfolio and role in global energy trade, especially between the EU, the Caspian, Caucasus, and Central Asia. Finally, the book concludes with recommendations for Turkish energy policy. The authors are expert scholars who have written extensively on Turkish regulatory reform and energy economics and who have broad knowledge of global energy market dynamics. The book will be a unique guide for those concerned with the different areas of the Turkish economy and international audiences interested in energy markets of Turkey and surrounding regions, making the book of interest to not only researchers in academia but also industry practitioners, regulators and policy makers as well.

Heat and Mass Transfer in Particulate Suspensions is a critical review of the subject of heat and mass transfer related to particulate Suspensions, which include both fluid-particles and fluid-droplet Suspensions. Fundamentals, recent advances and industrial applications are examined. The subject of particulate heat and mass transfer is currently driven by two significant applications: energy transformations -primarily combustion - and heat transfer equipment. The first includes particle and droplet combustion processes in engineering Suspensions as diverse as the Fluidized Bed Reactors (FBR's) and Internal Combustion Engines (ICE's). On the heat transfer side, cooling with nanofluids, which include nanoparticles, has attracted a great deal of attention in the last decade both from the fundamental and the applied side and has produced several scientific publications. A monograph that combines the fundamentals of heat transfer with particulates as well as the modern applications of the subject would be welcomed by both academia and industry.

The functionalization of surfaces on the nanoscale is one of the most fascinating and at the same time challenging topics in science. It is the key to tailoring catalysts, sensors, or devices for solar energy conversion, whose functional principle is based on the interaction of an active solid surface with another (liquid or gaseous) phase. As an example, planar transition metal complexes adsorbed on solid supports are promising candidates for novel heterogeneous catalysts. An important feature of these catalysts, compared to supported metal clusters, is the fact that the active sites, i. e. , the coordinated metal centers with their vacant axial coordination sites, are well de?ned and uniform. Metalloporphyrinoids are particularly suitable in this respect because they combine a structure forming element-the rigid molecular frame, which often induces long range order-with an active site, the coordinated metal ion. Its planar coordination environment leaves two axial coordination sites available for additional ligands. If adsorbed on a surface, one of these axial sites is occupied by the underlying substrate. The resulting electronic interaction with the surface can be used to tailor the electronic structure and thereby the reactivity of the metal center. The remaining site is free for the attachment of molecules (sensor functionality) and/or operates as a reaction center (single-site catalysis). Prototype examples are omnipresent in nature, where in particular metallo-tetrapyrrols play a decisive role in important biological processes, with the most prominent examples being iron porphyrins in heme, magnesium porphyrins in chlorophyll, and cobalt corrin in vitamin B12.

Energy has been an inevitable component of human lives for decades. Recent rapid developments in the area require analyzing energy systems not as independent components but rather as connected interdependent networks. The Handbook of Networks in Power Systems includes the state-of-the-art developments that occurred in the power systems networks, in particular gas, electricity, liquid fuels, freight networks, as well as their interactions. The book is separated into two volumes with three sections, where one scientific paper or more are included to cover most important areas of networks in power systems. The first volume covers topics arising in electricity network, in particular electricity markets, smart grid, network expansion, as well as risk management. The second volume presents problems arising in gas networks; such as scheduling and planning of natural gas systems, pricing, as well as optimal location of gas supply units. In addition, the second volume covers the topics of interactions between energy networks. Each subject is identified following the activity on the domain and the recognition of each subject as an area of research. The scientific papers are authored by world specialists on the domain and present either state-of-the-arts reviews or scientific developments.

This volume presents a collection of contributions dedicated to applied problems in the financial and energy sectors that have been formulated and solved in a stochastic optimization framework. The invited authors represent a group of scientists and practitioners, who cooperated in recent years to facilitate the growing penetration of stochastic programming techniques in real-world applications, inducing a significant advance over a large spectrum of complex decision problems. After the recent widespread liberalization of the energy sector in Europe and the unprecedented growth of energy prices in international commodity markets, we have witnessed a significant convergence of strategic decision problems in the energy and financial sectors. This has often resulted in common open issues and has induced a remarkable effort by the industrial and scientific communities to facilitate the adoption of advanced analytical and decision tools. The main concerns of the financial community over the last decade have suddenly penetrated the energy sector inducing a remarkable scientific and practical effort to address previously unforeseeable management problems. Stochastic Optimization Methods in Finance and Energy: New Financial Products and Energy Markets Strategies aims to include in a unified framework for the first time an extensive set of contributions related to real-world applied problems in finance and energy, leading to a common methodological approach and in many cases having similar underlying economic and financial implications. Part 1 of the book presents 6 chapters related to financial applications; Part 2 presents 7 chapters on energy applications; and Part 3 presents 5 chapters devoted to specific theoretical and computational issues.

Thermodiffusion in Multicomponent Mixtures presents the computational approaches that are employed in the study of thermodiffusion in various types of mixtures, namely, hydrocarbons, polymers, water-alcohol, molten metals, and so forth. We present a detailed formalism of these methods that are based on non-equilibrium thermodynamics or algebraic correlations or principles of the artificial neural network. The book will serve as single complete reference to understand the theoretical derivations of thermodiffusion models and its application to different types of multi-component mixtures. An exhaustive discussion of these is used to give a complete perspective of the principles and the key factors that govern the thermodiffusion process.

This volume focuses on incentive regulation and competition. While much of the regulatory action is taking place in telecommunications, the impact of competition and the resultant regulatory change is being felt in other traditional public utilities including electricity. The book reviews topics including price caps, incentive regulation, market structure and new regulatory technologies.

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 envisioned a competitive free-for-all in the U.S. telecommunications industry with removal of barriers to entry in local telecommunications markets and the lifting of the artificial restrictions that kept the Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCs) out of the interLATA long-distance market. After close to 5 years, only one RBOC has been granted permission (controversially) to enter the interLATA market, and local competition has yet to provide most consumers with meaningful choices. In addition, the wave of mergers across the industry has raised the specter of putting the former Bell System back together again. Policymakers now openly question whether the Act can deliver what it promised. Three principal themes are developed in this book. First, there has been a coordination failure between Congress and the FCC in translating the principles embodied in the Act into practice. The authors provide evidence for this by analyzing stock market reactions to legislative and regulatory actions. This coordination failure was largely predictable, given the ambiguity in the Act, as well as conflicting jurisdictions between the FCC and the states. Second, the Act calls for wholesale prices to be `based on cost.' Regulators adopted a costing standard (TELRIC) that provides a means to subsidize competitive entry in local telephone service markets. The ready adoption of the TELRIC standard by regulators is shown to be tied to the third theme: price cap regulation provides regulators with `insurance' against the adverse effects of competition in local telephone markets. Statistical analysis reveals that regulators in price cap states set uniformly lower unbundled network element prices (lower barriers to entry) in comparison with regulators in rate-of-return and earnings sharing states. The result is a triumph of regulatory processes over market processes - the antithesis of the purpose of the Act.

This book is a collection of chapters concerning the use of biomass for the sustainable production of energy and chemicals-an important goal that will help decrease the production of greenhouse gases to help mitigate global warming, provide energy security in the face of dwindling petroleum reserves, improve balance of payment problems and spur local economic development. Clearly there are ways to save energy that need to be encouraged more. These include more use of energy sources such as, among others, manure in anaerobic digesters, waste wood in forests as fuel or feedstock for cellulosic ethanol, and conservation reserve program (CRP) land crops that are presently unused in the US. The use of biofuels is not new; Rudolf Diesel used peanut oil as fuel in the ?rst engines he developed (Chap. 8), and ethanol was used in the early 1900s in the US as automobile fuel [Songstad et al. (2009) Historical perspective of biofuels: learning from the past to rediscover the future. In Vitro Cell Dev Biol Plant 45:189-192). Brazil now produces enough sugar cane ethanol to make up about 50% of its transportation fuel needs (Chap. 4). The next big thing will be cellulosic ethanol. At present, there is also the use of Miscanthus x giganteous as fuel for power plants in the UK (Chap. 2), bagasse (sugar cane waste) to power sugar cane mills (Chap. 4), and waste wood and sawdust to power sawmills (Chap. 7).

Energy is one of the world`s most challenging problems, and power systems are an important aspect of energy related issues. This handbook contains state-of-the-art contributions on power systems modeling and optimization. The book is separated into two volumes with six sections, which cover the most important areas of energy systems. The first volume covers the topics operations planning and expansion planning while the second volume focuses on transmission and distribution modeling, forecasting in energy, energy auctions and markets, as well as risk management. The contributions are authored by recognized specialists in their fields and consist in either state-of-the-art reviews or examinations of state-of-the-art developments. The articles are not purely theoretical, but instead also discuss specific applications in power systems.

Offering a re-evaluation of the power industry, this book discusses decision-making for problems where a particular decision affects the options available at the next decision time. It covers a wide range of topics, from dynamic programming to future market decisions.

Markets, Pricing, and Deregulation of Utilities examines the effects of deregulation on the energy and telecommunications industries in an economic environment that has changed dramatically since deregulation was first introduced in those industries several years ago. The contributors to this book discuss the aspects of deregulation that appear to be succeeding and those that seem to be failing. Within that framework, they offer insight as to the possible next stages of regulatory restructuring and reform. The contents of this book provide a strong theoretical base leading to a better understanding of markets, pricing, and deregulation by utility managers, regulators, and economists.

Multiprocessor platforms play important roles in modern computing systems, and appear in various applications, ranging from energy-limited hand-held devices to large data centers. As the performance requirements increase, energy-consumption in these systems also increases significantly. Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS), which allows processors to dynamically adjust the supply voltage and the clock frequency to operate on different power/energy levels, is considered an effective way to achieve the goal of energy-saving. This book surveys existing works that have been on energy-aware task scheduling on DVFS multiprocessor platforms. Energy-aware scheduling problems are intrinsically optimization problems, the formulations of which greatly depend on the platform and task models under consideration. Thus, Energy-aware Scheduling on Multiprocessor Platforms covers current research on this topic and classifies existing works according to two key standards, namely, homogeneity/heterogeneity of multi processor platforms and the task types considered. Under this classification, other sub-issues are also included, such as, slack reclamation, fixed/dynamic priority sched uling, partition-based/global scheduling, and application-specific power consumption, etc.

This Brief provides a cross-sectional analysis of development-directed investments in the wider Mekong region. The wider Mekong region includes Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam, Myanmar, and the Chinese province of Yunnan. Evidence highlights that a few critical dynamics, including human migration, natural resource flows, and financial investments, generate a high level of connectivity between these countries. Such high levels of connectivity increase complexity and the potential for ripple effects of national decisions. The emerging links between countries can unfold in financial investments, migration, or the flow of resources. As these links intensify the regional connectivity increases and over time a highly connected region can emerge, as experienced by the Mekong region. This Brief also contains a chapter at the end of the book featuring numerous charts and diagrams further illustrating the impact of development activities in the area.

This Handbook examines the subject of energy security: its definition, dimensions, ways to measure and index it, and the complicating factors that are often overlooked. The volume identifies varying definitions and dimensions of energy security, including those that prioritize security of supply and affordability alongside those that emphasize availability, energy efficiency, trade, environmental quality, and social and political stewardship. It also explores the various metrics that can be used to give energy security more coherence, and also to enable it to be measured, including recent attempts to measure energy security progress at the national level, with a special emphasis placed on countries within the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), countries within Asia, and industrialized countries worldwide. This Handbook: * Broadens existing discussions of energy security that center on access to fuels, including "oil security" and "coal security." * Focuses not only on the supply side of energy but also the demand, taking a hard look at energy services and politics along with technologies and infrastructure; * Investigates energy security issues such as energy poverty, equity and access, and development; * Analyzes ways to index and measure energy security progress at the national and international level. This book will be of much interest to students of energy security, energy policy, economics, environmental studies, and IR/Security Studies in general.

This volume is on the flexibility mechanisms of the Kyoto Protocol and summarises the main fmdings of a two day workshop on 'Dealing with Carbon Credits after Kyoto', organised by ETC and the JIN foundation (both from the Netherlands) in Callantsoog, the Netherlands, on 28-29 May 1998. The workshop was one of the fIrst meetings held on the flexibility mechanisms after the Kyoto Protocol had been accepted at the Third Conference of the Parties (CoP3) in Kyoto, Japan, in December 1997. During the workshop it became clear that during the stage of translating the Protocol provisions on the flexibility mechanisms (notably Articles 6, 12 and 17) into concrete action, there are still many questions on how to interpret the scope and meaning of the Protocol text precisely. Indeed, various issues need to be elaborated on before a full assessment of the future practical work - the start of CDM and JI projects and possibly international emissions trading - can be made. Several issues were addressed at the workshop: e. g. how and via which procedures to determine the net abatement of particular CDMIJI projects; who is liable for non compliance in international emissions trading; is there a need for credit sharing formulae; can incentives be provided for early action, etc.

Energy is one of the world`s most challenging problems, and power systems are an important aspect of energy related issues. This handbook contains state-of-the-art contributions on power systems modeling and optimization. The book is separated into two volumes with six sections, which cover the most important areas of energy systems. The first volume covers the topics operations planning and expansion planning while the second volume focuses on transmission and distribution modeling, forecasting in energy, energy auctions and markets, as well as risk management. The contributions are authored by recognized specialists in their fields and consist in either state-of-the-art reviews or examinations of state-of-the-art developments. The articles are not purely theoretical, but instead also discuss specific applications in power systems.

Within the Smart Grid, the combination of automation equipment, communication technology and IT is crucial. Interoperability of devices and systems can be seen as the key enabler of smart grids. Therefore, international initiatives have been started in order to identify interoperability core standards for Smart Grids. IEC 62357, the so called Seamless Integration Architecture, is one of these very core standards, which has been identified by recent Smart Grid initiatives and roadmaps to be essential for building and managing intelligent power systems. The Seamless Integration Architecture provides an overview of the interoperability and relations between further standards from IEC TC 57 like the IEC 61970/61968: Common Information Model - CIM. CIM has proven to be a mature standard for interoperability and engineering; consequently, it is a cornerstone of the IEC Smart Grid Standardization Roadmap. This book provides an overview on how the CIM developed, in which international projects and roadmaps is has already been covered and describes the basic use cases for CIM. This book has been written for both Power Engineers trying to get to know the EMS and business IT part of Smart Grid and for Computer Scientist finding out where ICT technology is applied in EMS and DMS Systems. The book is divided into two parts dealing with the theoretical foundations and a practical part describing tools and use cases for CIM.