Renewable energy in Germany | EPFL Graph Search

Renewable energy in Germany is mainly based on wind and biomass, plus solar and hydro. Germany had the world's largest photovoltaic installed capacity until 2014, and as of 2021 it has over 58 GW. It is also the world's third country by installed total wind power capacity, 64 GW in 2021 (59 GW in 2018) and second for offshore wind, with over 7 GW. Germany has been called "the world's first major renewable energy economy". The share of renewable electricity rose from just 3.4% of gross electricity consumption in 1990, provided by conventional hydro, to exceed 10% by 2005 thanks to additional biomass and wind, and reaching 42.1% of consumption in 2019. As with most countries, the transition to renewable energy in the transport and heating and cooling sectors has been considerably slower. According to official figures, around 370,000 people were employed in the renewable energy sector in 2010, particularly in small and medium-sized companies. Th

Impact of Urbanization and economic growth on environmental quality in Western Africa: What is the role of manufacturing activities and renewable energy?

Jérôme Chenal, Hassan Radoine

The countries in Western Africa have the greatest potential for renewable energy generation in the world and are likely to be vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change. Unfortunately, only a few of them have tapped into this potential, as non-renewable energy still dominates the total energy mix of these countries. The present study explores the effect of economic growth, manufacturing value-added, urbanization, financial development, foreign direct investment, and renewable energy consumption on the environmental quality in West African countries by using a sample of some selected countries over the period 1991–2018. This study is analyzed by adopting the method of Driscoll-Kraay (DK) panel regression. The panel result suggests that manufacturing value-added, urbanization, financial development, and foreign direct investment increase environmental degradation. In addition, the findings of this study reveal that economic growth and renewable energy consumption contribute, significantly, to environmental quality. Bidirectional causality exists between economic growth and CO2 emissions and between urbanization and environmental degradation. Accordingly, in order to improve environmental quality in these countries, it is imperative to embrace and promote the consumption of clean energy sources, which will contribute more to the promotion and adoption of renewables in this strategic region.

2022

Climate impact and energy sustainability of future European neighborhoods

Silvia Coccolo, Louis Marc Bruno Delannoy, Dasaraden Mauree, Amarasinghage Tharindu Dasun Perera, Salil Puri, Jean-Louis Scartezzini

This study presents a comprehensive analysis of typical European city centers energy demand and supply for present time and 2050, according to the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) climatic scenario A1B. Two multi-family houses are modeled, adapted and simulated considering local thermal characteristics and climate conditions of twenty-two European countries. An energy hub system is optimized in order to investigate how the micro-grid responds to the renewable energy integration for ten countries. The European heating demand is evaluated to be reduced by half by 2050 (49%) due to the climate change (6%) and refurbishment (43%) effects. Integration of renewable energy sources in most European countries is set to surpass the EU renewable energy targets given proper implementation of appropriate governmental polices coupled with emerging technological advancements in the renewable energy sector.

2019

Investment Planning Methodology for Complex Urban Energy Systems Applied to a Hospital Site

Francesca Belfiore, Bastien Maxence Bornand, Luc Girardin, François Maréchal, Jean-Loup Sylvain Robineau

Industrial process integration based on mixed integer linear programming has been used for decades to design and improve industrial processes. The technique has later been extended to solve multi-period and multi-scale problems for the design of urban energy systems. Assistance is indeed required for the elaboration of coordinated investment scheduling strategies to promote renewable and efficient urban energy infrastructure shaping the future energy context for the next decades. Major energy consumers, such as hospital complexes, airports, or educational campuses can act as a driving force for the development of renewable energy cities by attracting profitable large-scale energy networks and infrastructure. The proposed methodology generates optimal alternatives for the replacement, in a long-term perspective, of the various energy supply units and systems considering the evolution of the energy demand and the availability of the energy resources. Energy integration techniques are coupled to a parametric multi-objective optimization routine to select and size the energy equipment with both financial profitability and CO2 emission reduction as objectives. The originality of the developed method lies in the integration of a multi-period mixed integer linear programming formulation to generate long-term investment planning scenarios. The method has been demonstrated on a complex of eight hospitals totaling 466,000 m2 and an operating budget of 1.85 billion USD per year. The energy integration of new centralized and decentralized equipment has been evaluated on a monthly basis over four periods until the year 2035. The results show that among the four scenarios identified, the most optimistic alternative allows to decrease the final energy consumption of about 36%, cut the CO2 emissions by a half, multiply the renewable energy share by a factor 3.5 while reducing the annual total cost by 24%. This scenario considers mainly the integration of a very low temperature district heating with decentralized heat pumps to satisfy the heat requirements below 75°C, as well as heat recovery systems and the refurbishment of about 33% of the building stock.

2020

Investment Planning Methodology for Complex Urban Energy Systems Applied to a Hospital Site

Francesca Belfiore, Bastien Maxence Bornand, Luc Girardin, François Maréchal, Jean-Loup Sylvain Robineau

2020