O consumo de energia nos diferentes setores da economia cresce continuamente devido aos hábitos de consumo, aumento da população e necessidades tecnológicas atuais; considerando o efeito deste aumento de consumo sobre os recursos naturais, a conscientização da importância do uso racional da energia é cada dia um tópico de maior relevância em todo o mundo. Ante a crescente necessidade de reduzir o consumo energético das edificações, algumas metodologias apresentam-se como ferramentas úteis para o alcance deste fim, uma delas é a auditoria energética. A auditoria energética é um mecanismo para entender o desempenho energético de edifícios, através dela é possível detectar problemas operacionais, aumentar o conforto dos ocupantes e otimizar o uso da energia. O presente estudo utilizou uma metodologia de auditoria energética para conhecer o comportamento energético de diferentes prédios do setor terciário especificamente do setor educacional, pertencentes a Universidade de São Paulo (USP). A metodologia foi aplicada em diferentes edificações do setor, e a mesma incluiu a utilização de medições de variáveis elétricas, medições de iluminação segundo as normas preconizadas, software para estudo de usos finais e ferramentas de simulação computacional como o software Dialux e o EnergyPlus. As melhores oportunidades de eficiência energética foram avaliadas técnica e economicamente...

A região Amazônica é bastante conhecida por sua riqueza em termos de biodiversidade e de potencial energético advindo de sua extensa rede hidrográfica. Após um vasto histórico de tentativas de barramento de um de seus importantes afluentes -o rio Xingu-, fez-se um projeto para a construção do chamado Complexo Hidrelétrico de Belo Monte (CHE). O principal objetivo deste estudo é apresentar uma metodologia para avaliar um empreendimento hidrelétrico sob os aspectos Energéticos e Ambientais, valendo-se da Análise Energética, que inclui uma avaliação dos fluxos de energia e de emergia. Nesta dissertação o CHE de Belo Monte foi analisado energeticamente, a partir de duas linhas conceituais: a termodinâmica e a emergia. Primeiramente buscou-se dados referentes ao investimento energético no sistema de produção de eletricidade. Em seguida, converteu-se os dados energéticos em exergia e multiplicou-se os resultados obtidos pelas respectivas transformidades: fontes de energia renovável "gratuita" (7,29E+05 sej/ano), fonte de energia renovável comprada (3,12E+03 sej/ano), fontes de energia não renovável comprada (1,39E+05), fontes de energia não renovável "gratuita" (9,40E+06 sej/ano), fontes de energia não renováveis comprada (1...

A energia elétrica é um insumo com diversas aplicações. No caso industrial, este insumo corresponde a uma parcela daqueles utilizados na produção e, por isso, busca-se, cada vez mais, a racionalização deste tipo de energia, sem que, para isso, seja necessário diminuir o nível de produção, ou prejudicar a qualidade do produto final. No Brasil, o setor industrial é responsável por cerca da metade do consumo final de energia elétrica; logo, ações que visam estimular o uso racional e a conservação de energia elétrica são importantes. Este trabalho teve como objetivo analisar o uso da energia elétrica em instalações industriais do segmento de Alimentos e Bebidas, através de uma amostra situada na região Sudeste do Brasil. O segmento foi escolhido pelo fato de ter grande representatividade, em termos de maiores consumidores de energia elétrica, entre as indústrias do País. Para o desenvolvimento do trabalho, foi aplicado nas instalações industriais um questionário preliminar para identificar dados primários referentes aos processos e sistemas existentes em cada uma delas. Posteriormente, foram realizados diagnósticos energéticos nessas instalações para identificar e quantificar, através de medições em campo...

A implantação de um eficiente sistema de gestão da energia é um desafio recente para a maior parte das empresas industriais no Brasil. Neste trabalho, os conceitos de diagnósticos energéticos e sua aplicação em sistemas de gestão de energia na indústria são revisados e se propõe diretrizes para o seu emprego em uma unidade petroquímica de insumos básicos da Braskem, a mais antiga no Brasil. Foi calculado um potencial técnico médio de conservação de energia, no período entre 2009 e 2012, de 36,4% para esta unidade. Indicadores de desempenho energético são discutidos e oportunidades de ganhos de eficiência energética nesta unidade são apresentadas para os seguintes usos finais da energia/equipamentos: calor de processo, aquecimento direto, força motriz, sistemas de bombeamento e sistemas de ar comprimido. Um diagnóstico energético realizado nesta unidade em 2012, com a participação do autor desta dissertação, propiciou a detecção destas oportunidades. As propostas que visam à obtenção de avanços no atual sistema de gestão energética desta unidade da Braskem tem como balizadores o princípio de desenvolvimento empresarial sustentável e a perspectiva de um credenciamento futuro do sistema de gestão da energia pela norma ISO 50.001.; Setting-up an efficient energy management system is a recent challenge for most of the industrial companies in Brazil. The concepts of energy assessments and their application in industrial energy management systems are reviewed in this work and directives are proposed for they use in a petrochemical unit of Braskem that produces basic chemicals...

A pricing reform in Turkey increased the residential electricity tariff by more than 50 percent in 2008. The reform, aimed at encouraging energy efficiency and private investment, sparked considerable policy debate about its potential impact on household welfare. This paper estimates a short-run residential electricity demand function for evaluating the distributional consequences of the tariff reform. The model allows heterogeneity in household price sensitivities and is estimated using a national sample of 18,671 Turkish households. The model also addresses the common problem of missing data in survey research. The study reveals a highly skewed distribution of price elasticities in the population, with rich households three times more responsive in adjusting consumption to price changes than the poor. This is most likely because the poor are close to their minimum electricity consumption levels and have fewer coping options. In addition, the welfare loss of the poorest quintile -- measured by the consumer surplus change as a percentage of income -- is 2.9 times of that of the wealthiest.

In many countries of Sub-Saharan Africa energy sector planning has long been something of a paradoxical exercise in the context of modern as opposed to traditional fuels in the economy. Although essential to the functioning of society, modern fuels generally account for only 15 to 40 percent of total energy consumption. However, since they are inseparable from modern methods of energy transformation and use, these modern fuels absorb virtually all investments in the energy sector. Traditional fuels, on the other hand, although they occupy a dominant place in the overall energy balance and in the consumption of households, have received little in the way of planning and policy making attention and investments. The importance of traditional energy (fuelwood and charcoal) in terms of total energy consumption is significant. In low-income countries such as Burkina Faso and Ethiopia, the household sector accounts for more than 80 percent of total energy consumption and projections call for this rate of consumption to continue into the 21st century. Most traditional energy is used for household consumption (cooking and heating) and the daily lives of rural women are greatly influenced by its availability and use.

Government interventions in energy markets have many effects on the poor. But there has been little measurement of these effects, making it hard to know exactly what the effects of a project have been, and hard to compare those of different interventions. This could be rectified by building impact indicators into energy projects at the design phase--and doing so consistently and systematically, across countries and over time. This Note discusses the development of suitable indicators. First, agreement is needed on workable definitionsof poverty and what would constitute welfare improvements for the poor. Then there must be explicit hypotheses on how specific elements of energy projects, individually or together, affect the poor. Finally, the indicators must be based on data tha can be realistically be collected in real-life low-income communities, in real-life developing countries.

A Regional Workshop on Household Energy, Air Pollution and Health was held on 9-10 May 2002 in New Delhi, India. The two-day event provided a forum to exchange information on the latest research, share experiences in mitigation strategies and strengthen commitments to future action programs amongst various stakeholders from fifteen countries. The workshop was linked to the completion of a multisectoral study, India: Household Energy, Air Pollution and Health, undertaken by the World Bank with the support of the joint UNDP/World Bank Energy Sector Management Assistance Programme (ESMAP) and the Government of Norway. The World Bank and the Tata Energy Research Institute organized the workshop in collaboration with several agencies of the Government of India, including the Planning Commission, Ministry of Non-Conventional Energy Sources, Ministry of Environment and Forests and the Indian Council of Medical Research. The workshop was co-sponsored by the World Health Organization (WHO), United States Agency for International Development (USAID)...

This report presents findings on the ESMAP-funded Central America Gender and Sustainable Energy project. The project has provided support to the Mesoamerican Gender in Sustainable Energy (GENES) Network, which seeks to enable the equitable access of women and men to sustainable energy services. Between April and July, 2002, a series of two bi-national and one tri-national workshop on gender and sustainable energy was conducted for members of GENES. Specific objectives were : become familiar with various types of renewable energy technologies, their applications and trends in their use; understand the principle concepts of gender equity; reflect on the relationship between gender equity, sustainable development, and renewable energy, and identify how key concepts of gender equity can be applied in the workplace and in the field; familiarize with recent advances in the gender and energy nexus; become familiar with gender methodologies, their uses and limitations. To ground the concepts presented, each workshop incorporated a technology demonstration and / or a field visit to a project site where participants could see one or more applications of sustainable energy technologies. These trips included exchanges on solar coffee drying and solar cooking; solar lighting and water pumping and brief field visits to projects involving photovoltaic pumping and electrification; solar fruit and wood drying; and the use of improved cook stoves.

Tunisian social development policy making has always counted on energy subsidies to play a pivotal role. Due to the increasingly unsustainable budget implications, a new strategy has begun to reform the subsidy system in the energy sector while striking a balance between improving fiscal and equity considerations without increasing social tensions. This paper presents an analysis of the fiscal and distributive consequences of the changes to the subsidy setup announced by the government at the end of 2014. The results show that raising electricity prices for consumers and removing subsidies for other energy sources would lead to a short-term increase in the poverty rate of 2.5 percentage points. In addition, compensation mechanisms that could be readily implemented (such as universal coverage or building on the existing health cards system) will not bring substantive counterweight to the increased poverty, even if all savings of reforms could be perfectly channeled as cash transfers. The analysis suggests that bold reforms of energy subsidies need to be accompanied by equally bold improvements to the targeting schemes of public spending if poverty and disparities are to be substantively reduced.

E=MC³ Energy Equals Management's Continued Cost Concern, is an essay written by Fritz G. Hagenmeyer, Associate Professor, School of Hospitality Management at Florida International University. In the writing, Hagenmeyer initially tenders: “Energy problems in the hospitality industry can be contained or reduced, yielding elevated profits as a result of applied, quality management principles. The concepts, processes and procedures presented in this article are intended to aid present and future managers to become more effective with a sharpened focus on profitability.” This article is an overview of energy efficiency and the management of such. In an expanding energy consumption market with its escalating costs, energy management has become an ever increasing concern and component of responsible hospitality management, Hagenmeyer will have you know. “In endeavoring to "manage" on a day-to-day basis a functioning hospitality building's energy system, the person in charge must take on the role of Justice with her scales, attempting to balance the often varying comfort needs of guests and occupants with the invariable rising costs of energy utilized to generate and maintain such comfort conditions, since comfort is seen as an integral part of the "service...

The action plan has the target of increasing the percentage of households with electricity access in Sub-Saharan Africa from 25 percent in 2005 to 35 percent in 2015 and 47 percent by 2030. The plan noted that this target is feasible if countries improve their sector policies and implementation capacity and concessional financing doubles from US$2 billion to US$4 billion annually. The action plan emphasizes the importance of country leadership in developing national energy sector strategies, as well as the need for harmonization, alignment and coordination of donor support in line with the principles of partnership set out in the 2005 Paris declaration on aid effectiveness. The plan notes that enhancement of government's oversight and regulatory role will be keys and it emphasizes the role of the private sector both as a source of investment and for its technical and managerial know-how. Improved governance and private sector participation are both needed in bringing about efficiency improvements in the energy sector. The study was designed to be catalytic-i.e. to identify a shortlist of projects with transformational potential and then...

This study examines recent effective rates of protection across the Egyptian economy, using an ad valorem price wedge introduced by nontariff barriers and energy subsidies, and compares today's effective rates of protection with those of a decade ago. The study uses 23 aggregated sectors from input-output matrix information. Although trade liberalization since the late-1990s has had a considerable impact in reducing protection of some industries, some sectors, such as the food and tobacco sector, remain relatively highly protected, due to tariff escalation and nontariff barriers, and due to energy subsidies. Energy subsidies are not formally sector specific but do favor sectors that are energy intensive (of particular note is the electricity sector). It appears that energy pricing is part of a strategy to subsidize and promote certain industries and in effect offset the dis-protection or taxation that results from tariffs on intermediate inputs. The case of the cement sector is notable because energy subsidies appear to almost exactly offset the negative impacts of tariffs and indirect taxes. The fertilizer sector has zero nominal tariffs...

The purpose of this Activity Completion Report is to sumarize the results of support from ESMAP to Mongolia in the rehabilitation of its electricity and district heating systems during the period 1994 to 1998. ESMAP ascertained the level and sources of losses in the electricity and district heating distribution systems in Ulaanbaatar; and propose a set of actions and investments to lower these losses to economic levels. ESMAP's research resulted in three main conclusions: 1) in the power distribution system in Ulaanbaatar, overall energy losses on the transmission and distribution (TD) system are following an upward trend, increasing from about 27 percent of the net energy supplied in 1995 to 30 percent in 2000. of these losses, about 14 percent are estimated to be technical losses and 16 percent are estimated to be non-technical losses. The major problems are occurring in the low-voltage system, as opposed to the mid-voltage system. the current cstomer relations setup and sales function must be changed for the company forto act on a commercial basis and for future privatization. 2) Water loss constitutes the major problem in the district heating system...

We discuss the main myths related to the vacuum energy and cosmological constant, such as: ``unbearable lightness of space-time''; the dominating contribution of zero point energy of quantum fields to the vacuum energy; non-zero vacuum energy of the false vacuum; dependence of the vacuum energy on the overall shift of energy; the absolute value of energy only has significance for gravity; the vacuum energy depends on the vacuum content; cosmological constant changes after the phase transition; zero-point energy of the vacuum between the plates in Casimir effect must gravitate, that is why the zero-point energy in the vacuum outside the plates must also gravitate; etc. All these and some other conjectures appear to be wrong when one considers the thermodynamics of the ground state of the quantum many-body system, which mimics macroscopic thermodynamics of quantum vacuum. In particular, in spite of the ultraviolet divergence of the zero-point energy, the natural value of the vacuum energy is comparable with the observed dark energy. That is why the vacuum energy is the plausible candidate for the dark energy.; Comment: 24 pages, 2 figures, submitted to the special issue of Int. J. Mod. Phys. devoted to dark energy and dark matter, IJMP style

Byrne, John; Energy poverty in developing countries has been conventionally attributed to a lack of access to sufficient, sustainable and modern forms of energy (ESMAP 2001; Modi et al. 2006). Per this definition, Sub-Saharan Africa is the most energy poor region in the world today. In line with this, efforts at addressing energy poverty in the region have concentrated on the expansion of access to modern energy sources, particularly electricity. In spite of the implementation of diverse energy development interventions, access to modern energy services remains limited. That energy poverty remains one of the most pressing challenges in Sub-Saharan Africa today in spite of the many decades of energy development necessitates a candid and thorough re-evaluation of the questions that have been traditionally asked about this issue and the solutions that have been offered in response to it. Based on theoretical analyses and empirical studies in peri-urban Kumasi, Ghana, this study attempts to offer some of the much needed re-evaluations. Using Kuhn's paradigm approach as a conceptual tool, this dissertation identifies peri-urban energy poverty as a paradigm-scale conflict in the modern arrangement of energy-development relations. By emphasizing the importance of context and political economy in understanding energy poverty...

Warren, Robert; This study explores the role of cities in sustainable energy development through a governance-informed analysis. Despite the leading position of municipalities in energy sustainability, cities have been mostly conceptualized as sites where energy development is shaped by external policy scales, i.e. the national level. A growing body of research, however, critiques this analytical perspective, and seeks to better understand the type of factors and dynamics that influence energy sustainability within a multi-level policy context for urban energy. Given that particular circumstances are applicable across cities, a context-specific analysis can provide insight regarding how sustainable energy development takes place in urban areas. In applying such an analytical perspective on urban energy sustainability, this study undertakes a qualitative case study analysis for the city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, by looking at four key local policy initiatives relevant to building energy efficiency and solar electricity development at the municipal government and city-wide level. The evaluation of the initiatives suggests that renewable electricity use has increased substantially in the city over the last years but the installed capacity of local renewable electricity systems...

The difficulty involved in the calculation of the energy cost during most of the physical activities is related to the mixed nature of the energy elicited. Therefore, it is important to know under which exercise condition it is possible to perform such measurements and under which conditions it is not. Several terms are often associated with this line of research, such as: energy expenditure, caloric expenditure or energy cost. The aim of the current paper was to remind the methods that are typically used to assess energy cost and to propose a more precise nomenclature when teaching or researching under these thematic. The use of expired O2 to quantify aerobic energy seems undisputable. As to anaerobic lactic energy, more studies are required, using both the blood lactate energy equivalent and the accumulated oxygen deficit. The term “energy expenditure” should be used only when energy release is almost fully aerobic and when direct O2 measurement can be performed during exercise. In every other conditions of exercise, the term “energy cost” is more suitable, as it cannot be directly assessed. Whenever “energy cost” is referred, it should be accompanied by the identification of whether aerobic fraction, anaerobic fraction or total energy cost is considered.; A dificuldade de cálculo do custo energético durante a maioria das atividades físicas reside no fato da solicitação energética ser mista. Importa saber identificar em que condição é possível medir ou estimar o custo energético e em que condição tal não é possível. Existe uma utilização de diferentes termos associados a esta temática como...

South Africa is an energy-intensive country. The inefficient use of, mostly, coal-generated energy is the cause of South Africa's per capita contribution to greenhouse gas emissions, pollution and environmental degradation and negative health impacts. The inefficient use of the country's energy also amounts to the injudicious use of natural resources. Improvements in energy efficiency are an important strategy to stabilise the country's energy crisis. Government responded to this challenge by introducing measures such as policies and legislation to change energy consumption patterns by, amongst others, incentivising the transition to improved energy efficiencies. A central tenet underpinning this review is that the law and energy nexus requires a multidisciplinary approach as well as a multi-pronged adoption of diverse policy instruments to effectively transform the country's energy use patterns. Numerous, innovative instruments are introduced by relevant legislation to encourage the transformation of energy generation and consumption patterns of South Africans. One such innovative instrument is the ISO 50001 energy management standard. It is a voluntary instrument, to plan for, measure and verify energy-efficiency improvements. These improvements may also trigger tax concessions. In this paper...

Ecosystems services include the collection, concentration, and storage of solar energy as fossil fuels (e.g., coal, petroleum, and natural gas). These concentrated forms of energy were produced by ancient ecosystem services. However, our legal and economic systems fail to recognise the value of the ecosystem service subsidies embedded in fossil fuels. This ecosystem services price subsidy causes overuse and waste of fossil fuels in the free market: fossil fuels are consumed more quickly than they can be replaced by ecosystem services and in far larger quantities than they would be if the price of fossil fuels included the cost of solar energy collection, concentration and manufacturing of raw fossil fuels. Moreover, burning fossil fuels produces enormous environmental, human health and welfare costs and damage. Virtually no legal literature on ecosystem services, sustainable development, or sustainable energy, considers fossil fuels in this context. Without understanding stored energy as an ecosystem service, we cannot reasonably expect to manage our fossil fuel energy resources sustainably. International and domestic energy law and policy systems generally ignore this feature of fossil fuel energy, a blind spot that explains why reducing greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels is fundamentally a political challenge. This paper will use new understandings emerging from the field of complex systems to critique existing legal decision-making models that do not adequately account for energy ecosystem services in policy design...