Introduction Fuel cells offer the tantalizing promise of cleaner electricity with less impact on the environment than traditional energy conversion technologies. This is because fuel cells are direct electrochemical energy conversion devices. In other words, they convert chemical energy, in the form of a fuel and oxidant, directly into electrical energy. Contrast this to combustion engines, whi...

The urban heat island effect 1 can be detected throughout the year, but it is of particular public policy concern during the summer, because higher surface air temperature is associated with increases in electricity demand for air conditioning, air pollution, and heat stress–related mortality and illness (Rosenfeld et al. 1995; Nowak et al. 2000; Sailor et al. 2002; Hogrefe et al. 2004). In New...

With an increasing use of distributed energy resources and intelligence in the electricity infrastructure, the possibilities for minimizing costs of household energy consumption increase. Technology is moving toward a situation in which households manage their own energy generation and consumption, possibly in cooperation with each other. As a first step, in this paper a decentralized controlle...

We report the design, optimization, and experimental results of large area commercial silicon solar cell based thermophotovoltaic (TPV) energy conversion systems. Using global non-linear optimization tools, we demonstrate theoretically a maximum radiative heat-to-electricity efficiency of 6.4% and a corresponding output electrical power density of 0.39 W cm(-2) at temperature T = 1660 K when im...

Balance between electricity production and consumption plays an important role for future strategic plan of a region. From this point of view, the concerning region should be aware of and forecast future production-consumption cycle and balance them. In this research, Northern-Iraq situation is taken into consideration to elaborate electricity energy consumption and compare with the generation....

With the evolution of electricity market transformation, there is a renewed interest in distributed generation (DG)—that has a promising role for mitigating technical, regulatory, and environmental constraints in the electricity sector. These benefi ts are further enhanced with the ability of such DG in heat recovery applications in which the waste heat is used to produce hot water, heat buildi...