The winners in hydropower and other large dam projects are those who gain electricity, domestic water supplies, sanitation, drought relief, sustainable irrigation, flood control, improved water transport, industrial and employment opportunities, food security, better roads, telecommunications, and other benefits. As well, other economic multipliers may arise and whole regions may flourish. This is an impressive list and is the very basis of modernization and liberation from the drudgery of traditional low technology rural life. Electricity, radio, and domestic water supplies completely transform the lives of those who gain these goods, and better health and education are the most obvious outcomes. (more…)
The water levels of most of the world’s rivers fluctuate with seasonal rains, melting snows, or droughts, and in the arid zones ...
Up to around 1980, hydropower research and development (R&D) efforts focused mainly on improving turbine efficiency, reducing c ...
The World Commission on Dams (WCD) was formed in 1998 by a joint initiative of the World Conservation Union (IUCN) and the Worl ...
Hydropower, also known as hydroelectric power, is the use of water to produce power. Harnessing water to perform work has been ...
The first step in categorizing potential benefits and costs is determining the relevant scope of the analysis. We have concluded th ...
Global energy consumption in the last half century has increased very rapidly and is expected to continue to grow over the next 50 years. However, we expect to see significant differences between the last 50 years and the next. The past increase was stimulated by relatively “cheap” fossil fuels and increased rates of industrialization in North America, Europe, and Japan; yet while energy consumption in these countries continues to increase, additional factors are making the picture for the next 50 years more complex. These additional complicating factors include the very rapid increase fuel economy in energy use in China and India (countries representing about a third of the world’s population); the expected depletion of oil resources in the not-too-distant future; and the effect of human activities on global climate change. (more…)
The relationship of gross national product per capita to energy consumption per capita for most countries of the world correlat ...
The long-term prospects for the U.K. economy are inevitably uncertain, and the most recent Department of Energy long-term proje ...
Transportation is another sector that has increased its relative share of primary energy use. This sector has serious concerns ...
The development of the ‘‘new’’ wind and solar technologies is of great importance for the future contribution of RESs to energy sup ...
To determine the effects of past climate trends on global energy consumption, the econometric equations providing the degree day el ...
The volatility in oil prices since the early 1970s is a remarkable feature of energy economics. Annual fluctuations in the oil price level, as measured by the absolute value of year-to-year price changes, averaged only 1% in the 1949–1970 period; from 1970 to date, these fluctuations increased dramatically, reaching an order of magnitude of 30% per year. Even in the relatively stable period from 1986 to 1997, oil prices were more volatile than other primary commodities. (more…)
In the post-World War II period, until the beginning of the 1970s, oil price fluctuations were very small. From 1949 to 1970, a ...
The focus of this section is on the quantitative assessment of the impact of oil price fluctuations on inflation. For that purp ...
The evolution of oil prices is typically subject to a very high degree of uncertainty, given the extremely volatile nature of c ...
Most major oil and gas firms engage in both upstream (i.e., hydrocarbon exploration and production) and downstream (i.e., hydro ...
There are many possible reasons for suspecting market failure in a product like gasoline. Throughout the world, the exploration ...
Reductions in carbon intensity, C/E, the carbon emitted per unit of energy generated, reflect the degree to which societies decarbonize their energy sources. The long-term trend has been a shift from coal to oil to natural gas––hydrocarbons with decreasing C/H ratios emitting progressively less CO2 per joule. However, the increasing use of clean low-carbon fuels is not sustainable without somehow disposing of excess carbon because it opposes the trend in the abundance of fossil fuels, with coal resources being the most abundant followed by oil and gas. (more…)
The global cycling of carbon involves both biological and physical processes. Only the biological components are discussed here. Pl ...
The flux of carbon among terrestrial, aquatic, and atmospheric pools is at least partially controlled by photosynthetic process ...
It is of interest to examine potential sources of greenhouse gases sources or atmospheric CO2 by analysis of the global distrib ...
Climate change caused by the enhanced greenhouse effect is one of the most significant global environmental issues. Increased emiss ...
The global carbon cycle involves both biological and physical processes. Only the biological components are discussed here. Pla ...
Corporate environmental strategy (CES) involves the tools, management programs, processes, and product development choices that allow a firm to pursue competitive advantage through environmental management strategies.
Management scholars such as Deming and Juran spent several decades after World War II making sure that quantity and quality processes entered the plans of corporate strategy, along with the classical concerns of price, technical quality, and distribution matters. In a similar but often more diffuse manner, the proponents of corporate environmental strategy began, in the l970s through the l990s, to alter the standard decision models of corporate strategy to include externalities that challenged the future growth of corporations, such as new environmental regulations or irregularities in energy markets and pricing. (more…)
Although it is significant that many of the above four imperatives are qualitative, not quantitative, such new efforts have begun t ...
In the pursuit of superior cars, electronic products, and computing, several leading multinational corporations began in the last q ...
There are several options that, ultimately, must be integrated when attempting to realize a change in corporate culture: the legal ...
In this new century, there is considerable pressure on the top six automakers to reduce their environmental and ecological footprin ...
Whatever the actual motivation, American policymakers perceived a need after 1973 to restrict automobile and light truck cons ...
There are various and somewhat complementary reasons to foster the growth of renewable energy sources in Europe. A major incentive for renewable energy sources policies in the past two decades has been to reduce the environmental impact of energy use both locally (e.g., pollutant emission reduction) and globally (e.g., greenhouse gas and carbon emissions reduction). In some countries, concerns about the safety of nuclear power generation have motivated the search for renewable energy sources. Another motivation for replacing foreign fossil and nuclear fuels with domestic renewable energy sources relates to security issues and Europe’s growing dependency on foreign energy sources. (more…)
In Europe, modern renewable energy sources technologies were explored thoroughly for the first time after the oil embargo/ price cr ...
Renewable energy sources cannot run out and causes so little damage to the environment that its use does not need to be restric ...
The development of the ‘‘new’’ wind and solar technologies is of great importance for the future contribution of RESs to energy sup ...
World energy use has increased steadily over the past several decades. Much of the growth in world energy consumption has been ...
Over the last decade, the number of countries researching the potential of biomass and bioenergy for energy services rose rapid ...
At present, in the United States and worldwide, motor vehicles are fueled almost exclusively by petroleum based gasoline (or reformulated gasoline) and diesel fuels. Since the first oil price shock in 1973, efforts have been made to seek alternative fuels to displace gasoline and diesel fuels and achieve energy and environmental benefits. Some of the alternative fuels that have been researched and used are liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), compressed natural gas (CNG), liquefied natural gas (LNG), methanol (MeOH), dimethyl ether (DME), Fischer– Tropsch diesel (FTD), hydrogen (H 2 ), ethanol (EtOH), biodiesel, and electricity. Production processes associated with gasoline, diesel, and each of these alternative fuels differ. (more…)
There are different types of vehicle propulsion systems and the transportation fuels that have been studied for their potential ...
Gasoline is used mainly by cars, motorcycles, and light trucks; diesel is used mainly by heavier trucks, buses, and trains. Togethe ...
The energy efficiencies of various fuel production pathways from well to pump. The efficiencies shown are defined as the energy ...
The United States depends heavily on imported oil to fuel its transportation infrastructure. The use of alternative fuel derive ...
Most alternative fuel vehicles on the road today were originally designed for gasoline, but converted for use with an alternative f ...
The age of industrialization came into full force through the modern exploration and use of fossil fuels. As one of its most striking phenomena, the rapid expansion of cities throughout the late 19th and the 20th centuries was a direct outcome of the fossil fuel energy economy as well. (more…)
The aim is to work with cities in advancing renewable energy technologies and systems and to help promote the renewable energy indu ...
The Solar City approach originally emerged from a new generation of International Energy Agency (IEA) energy research and developme ...
In the absence of useful and established patterns of practice, a search is under way for new means of reconciling local government’ ...
As a reaction to these historical perspectives, the building industry has witnessed a certain rise in design responses to regio ...
Climate change caused by the enhanced greenhouse effect is one of the most significant global environmental issues. Increased emiss ...
Nuclear energy has some distinct advantages in strengthening the external dimension of energy supply security. These include:
• Nuclear power plants produce electricity domestically. Their capital and labor inputs are also provided domestically. With more than 90% of its inputs in terms of value sourced domestically, it can be considered a largely domestic source of energy and electricity.
• Of course, a majority of OECD countries import part or all of their requirements of uranium plutonium. (more…)
Nuclear fission and fusion Research and Development continues to account for nearly half of the total spending by IEA countries, al ...
The continuous availability and affordability of energy and, in particular, electricity supply is an indispensable condition fo ...
Geopolitical risk refers almost always to primary energy carriers (oil, gas, coal, uranium or renewable energy) since their loc ...
Within the coming years, fossil fuel will be failed back its main role as the ultimate main energy sources. Fossil fuels has kn ...
Following the recent completion of three nuclear power plants, there is now some 9.6 GW of nuclear capacity in the United Kingd ...
“Spain has great potential but lack geothermal legislation and investment.” Besides being clean, renewable and friendly, easily manageable, which contributes to security of energy supply.
However, like other renewable energy sources, requires the development of sustainable energy technology push policies and efficient and environment economic support. (more…)
Mieres campus yesterday welcomed the conclusion of the technical conference on geothermal energy as alternative renewable energy. E ...
The Geologists Association president advocates the use of geothermal energy by its high durability and low maintenance. Besides a r ...
In most countries, geothermal resources are classified as natural resources belonging to the government. Since the 1980s, there has ...
Although technology change (usually involving an improvement in energy efficiency) is not inherently a geographic process, it does ...
According to the German standard VDI 4640 geothermal energy is stored energy as heat beneath the Earth's solid surface, encompa ...