Climate change and energy use : The role for anthropological research

The expression 'global climate change' no longer designates merely a discourse on possible future risks; today it us used as a shorthand for specific ongoing events that are having a serious impact on the lives of people around the world. In the light of this change and consequent efforts to limit carbon dioxide emissions, contributions from social scientists are increasingly in demand within the study of energy use. My concern here is not whether intervention is a proper role for anthropologists, but rather how we may position ourselves within energy- and climate-related research.

A methodology for building energy modelling and calibration in warm climates

PEDRINI, Aldomar; WESTPHAL, F. S.; LAMBERT, R.. A methodology for building energy modelling and calibration in warm climates. Building And Environment, Australia, n. 37, p.903-912, 2002. Disponível em: user=687335&_pii=S0360132302000513&_origin=search&_coverDate=09%2F30%2F2002&_sk=999629991&view=c&wchp=dGLzVtb-zSkzV&md5=f6342003b53dd1448e30308d082ba957&ie=/sdarticle.pdf>. Acesso em: 04 out. 2010.

Energy education: breaking up the rational energy use barriers

Human development is associated directly or indirectly with the energy use, and because of this the energetic sources were dealt with in the recent past, as fully available to human necessities. The reality shows that the energy availability, considering the nonrenewable sources, is limited, and beyond that, the exploration, the processing and the use of energy impose considerable impacts on the environment. There is not a system which operates with no losses and without imposing changes to the environment. Therefore, the energy conservation incorporates the concepts and the actions applied to the research of sustainable balance between nature and the energy availability and use. Such actions can be presented both in the short term, in which the energy system is close to a collapse, or in the medium/long term, in which those responsible for the energy policies are concerned with the structure of the socioeconomic development. Such a situation requires more responsibility in the treatment of energy questions, mainly through education, which represents long-term investments. This paper discusses barriers that are present in the projects applied to energy conservation, by making clear that education is one of the best ways to transform the human behavior in for the rational use of energy. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. Ltd. All rights reserved.

Urban sprawl and energy use for transportation in the largest Brazilian cities

A study of the relationships between the amount of energy consumed for transportation purposes and a few selected variables related to urban form and socioeconomic characteristics of some of the largest Brazilian cities is conducted in this work. The studied cities include all 27 state capitals regardless of their size and population and 184 urban areas each with more than 20,000 inhabitants located in the state of São Paulo. Two different techniques were applied for data analyses: a more traditional regression analysis approach and artificial neural networks. In general, the results found in the analyses conducted here support the assumption that urban sprawl increases the energy use for transportation. In the case of the 27 state capitals, the analysis indicated that two spatial variables have a strong impact on the energy consumed for urban transportation: urban density and the ratio between the longest distances in the east-west and north-south directions. In the case of the 184 urbanized areas we also reached a similar conclusion. In that case, however, income and employment level apparently have a stronger influence on the amount of energy consumed. The results of the present study stress the importance of physical planning in developing country cities in order to reduce energy use for transportation. © 2007 International Energy Initiative, Inc.

Design of high fidelity building energy monitoring system

Building energy meter network, based on per-appliance monitoring system, willbe an important part of the Advanced Metering Infrastructure. Two key issues exist for designing such networks. One is the network structure to be used. The other is the implementation of the network structure on a large amount of small low power devices, and the maintenance of high quality communication when the devices have electric connection with high voltage AC line. The recent advancement of low-power wireless communication makes itself the right candidate for house and building energy network. Among all kinds of wireless solutions, the low speed but highly reliable 802.15.4 radio has been chosen in this design. While many network-layer solutions have been provided on top of 802.15.4, an IPv6 based method is used in this design. 6LOWPAN is the particular protocol which adapts IP on low power personal network radio. In order to extend the network into building area without, a specific network layer routing mechanism-RPL, is included in this design. The fundamental unit of the building energy monitoring system is a smart wall plug. It is consisted of an electricity energy meter, a RF communication module and a low power CPU. The real challenge for designing such a device is its network firmware. In this design, IPv6 is implemented through Contiki operation system. Customize hardware driver and meter application program have been developed on top of the Contiki OS. Some experiments have been done, in order to prove the network ability of this system.

The effect of demand, tank parameters, and pumping stations on energy use in municipal drinking water distribution systems

Two of the indicators of the UN Millennium Development Goals ensuring environmental sustainability are energy use and per capita carbon dioxide emissions. The increasing urbanization and increasing world population may require increased energy use in order to transport enough safe drinking water to communities. In addition, the increase in water use would result in increased energy consumption, thereby resulting in increased green-house gas emissions that promote global climate change. The study of multiple Municipal Drinking Water Distribution Systems (MDWDSs) that relates various MDWDS aspects--system components and properties--to energy use is strongly desirable. The understanding of the relationship between system aspects and energy use aids in energy-efficient design. In this study, components of a MDWDS, and/or the characteristics associated with the component are termed as MDWDS aspects (hereafter--system aspects). There are many aspects of MDWDSs that affect the energy usage. Three system aspects (1) system-wide water demand, (2) storage tank parameters, and (3) pumping stations were analyzed in this study. The study involved seven MDWDSs to understand the relationship between the above-mentioned system aspects in relation with energy use. A MDWDSs model, EPANET 2.0, was utilized to analyze the seven systems. Six of the systems were real and one was a hypothetical system. The study presented here is unique in its statistical approach using seven municipal water distribution systems. The first system aspect studied was system-wide water demand. The analysis involved analyzing seven systems for the variation of water demand and its impact on energy use. To quantify the effects of water use reduction on energy use in a municipal water distribution system, the seven systems were modeled and the energy usage quantified for various amounts of water conservation. It was found that the effect of water conservation on energy use was linear for all seven systems and that all the average values of all the systems' energy use plotted on the same line with a high R 2 value. From this relationship, it can be ascertained that a 20% reduction in water demand results in approximately a 13% savings in energy use for all seven systems analyzed. This figure might hold true for many similar systems that are dominated by pumping and not gravity driven. The second system aspect analyzed was storage tank(s) parameters. Various tank parameters: (1) tank maximum water levels, (2) tank elevation, and (3) tank diameter were considered in this part of the study. MDWDSs use a significant amount of electrical energy for the pumping of water from low elevations (usually a source) to higher ones (usually storage tanks). The use of electrical energy has an effect on pollution emissions and, therefore, potential global climate change as well. Various values of these tank parameters were modeled on seven MDWDSs of various sizes using a network solver and the energy usage recorded. It was found that when averaged over all seven analyzed systems (1) the reduction of maximum tank water level by 50% results in a 2% energy reduction, (2) energy use for a change in tank elevation is system specific, and (2) a reduction of tank diameter of 50% results in approximately a 7% energy savings. The third system aspect analyzed in this study was pumping station parameters. A pumping station consists of one or more pumps. The seven systems were analyzed to understand the effect of the variation of pump horsepower and the number of booster stations on energy use. It was found that adding booster stations could save energy depending upon the system characteristics. For systems with flat topography, a single main pumping station was found to use less energy. In systems with a higher-elevation neighborhood, however, one or more booster pumps with a reduced main pumping station capacity used less energy. The energy savings for the seven systems was dependent on the number of boosters and ranged from 5% to 66% for the analyzed five systems with higher elevation neighborhoods (S3, S4, S5, S6, and S7). No energy savings was realized for the remaining two flat topography systems, S1, and S2. The present study analyzed and established the relationship between various system aspects and energy use in seven MDWDSs. This aids in estimating the amount of energy savings in MDWDSs. This energy savings would ultimately help reduce Greenhouse gases (GHGs) emissions including per capita CO 2 emissions thereby potentially lowering the global climate change effect. This will in turn contribute to meeting the MDG of ensuring environmental sustainability.

Good intents but low impacts: Various determinants for different indicators of overall energy use

Energy consumption in industrialized countries by far exceeds a sustainable level. Previous research on determinants of overall consumption levels has yielded contradictory results as to what the main drivers are. While research on the relationship of environmental concerns and pro-environmental behavior emphasizes the importance of motivational aspects, more impact-oriented research challenges these findings and underlines the impacts of a person’s social standing. The aim of our research was to determine which amount of per-capita energy consumption can be explained by structural, socio-demographic, and pro-environmentally motivational variables. Data come from standardized interviews with a representative sample (N=1014) in Germany. Different indicators of per-capita use were collected and will provide the basis for calculating the overall consumption level. In addition, person variables, lifestyle milieus, self-reported energy use, and motivational variables were assessed. First regression analyses show various patterns of determinants for different indicators of overall energy use. While variance in self-reported use is mainly explained by environmental concern, more impact-oriented indicators, such as the size of personal living space and distances of vacation trips, predominantly correlate with status-relevant predictors. These preliminary results support the suspicion that although environmentally aware people intend to reduce their energy use, they rarely go beyond low-impact actions.

Intermediate band materials for more efficient solar energy use: quantum modelling and experimental realizations

The intermediate band (IB) solar cell (Fig. 1) has been proposed [1] to increase photovoltaic efficiency by a factor above 1.5, based on the absorption of two sub-bandgap photons to promote an electron across the bandgap. To realize this principle, that can be applied also to obtain efficient photocatalysis with sunlight, we proposed in recent years several materials where a metal or heavy element, substituting for an electropositive atom in a known semiconductor that has an appropriate band gap width (around 2 eV), forms inside the gap the partially filled levels needed for this aim

Evaluation of the utilization of electric vehicles for building energy management in hotels

Governments are working in new policies to slow down total energy consumption and greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions, promoting the deployment of electric vehicles (EVs) in all countries. In order to facilitate this deployment and help to reduce the final costs of their batteries, additional utilization of EVs when those are parked has been proposed. EVs can be used to minimize the total electricity cost of buildings (named vehicle to building applications, V2B). In this paper an economic evaluation of EVs in the Building Energy Management System is shown. The optimal storage capacity and its equivalent number of EVs are determined. This value is then used for determining the optimal charging schedule to be applied to the batteries. From this schedule, the total expected profit is derived for the case of a real hotel in Spain.

Guidelines for Linked Data generation and publication: an example in building energy consumption

Linked Data is the key paradigm of the Semantic Web, a new generation of the World Wide Web that promises to bring meaning (semantics) to data. A large number of both public and private organizations have published their data following the Linked Data principles, or have done so with data from other organizations. To this extent, since the generation and publication of Linked Data are intensive engineering processes that require high attention in order to achieve high quality, and since experience has shown that existing general guidelines are not always sufficient to be applied to every domain, this paper presents a set of guidelines for generating and publishing Linked Data in the context of energy consumption in buildings (one aspect of Building Information Models). These guidelines offer a comprehensive description of the tasks to perform, including a list of steps, tools that help in achieving the task, various alternatives for performing the task, and best practices and recommendations. Furthermore, this paper presents a complete example on the generation and publication of Linked Data about energy consumption in buildings, following the presented guidelines, in which the energy consumption data of council sites (e.g., buildings and lights) belonging to the Leeds City Council jurisdiction have been generated and published as Linked Data.

Energy use in transportation, selected references.

Mode of access: Internet.

Energy use and other comparisons between diesel and gasoline pickup trucks. Interim report.

Transportation Systems Center, Cambridge, Mass.

Uncertainty in future global energy use and fossil fuel CO₂ emissions 1975 to 2075 /

Mode of access: Internet.

Energy use in freight transportation /

Mode of access: Internet.