The use of renewable energy sources is becoming increasingly necessary, if we are to achieve the changes required to address the impacts of global warming. Biomass is the most common form of renewable energy, widely used in the third world but until recently, less so in the Western world. Latterly much attention has been focused on identifying suitable biomass species, which can provide high-en...

Governments and private investors are becoming aware of the problems derived from the energy dependency on fossil fuels and other non-renewable energies. In this context, proton exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFC), which use hydrogen as fuel, are gaining increasing attention as clean and efficient energy conversion devices for a broad range of applications, such as automotive, stationary combi...

The magnitude of humanity’s energy needs requires that we embrace a multitude of various energy sources and applications. For a variety of reasons, nuclear energy must be a major portion of the distribution, at least one-third. The often-cited strategic hurdle to this approach is nuclear waste disposal. Present strategies concerning disposal of nuclear waste need to be changed if the world is t...

Abatraet-The objective of life-extending control is to achieve a trade-off between structural durabiilty and dynamic performance. This paper focuses on structural durability of the main steam header under load following to illustrate how the life-extending control of fossil fuel power plants can be achieved via feedforward/feedback. This concept is potentially applicable to both new and aging p...

In this paper an intelligent hybrid coordinatedcontrol system for a fossil-fuel power unit is presented. First, the intelligent system-based approach is justified arguing that conventional and modern approaches, used alone, do not provide an adequate framework to satisfy current operation objectives. Second, several hybrid control schemes that incorporate intelligent techniques are reviewed. Th...

For fossil fuel power plants to be built in the future, carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies offer the potential for significant reductions in CO2 emissions. We examine the break-even value for CCS adoptions, that is, the critical value in the charge for CO2 emissions that would justify investment in CCS capabilities. Our analysis takes explicitly into account that the supply of electr...

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