André Pina

Technical University of Lisbon | UTL · Centre for Innovation, Technology and Policy Research (IN+)

District heating networks are commonly addressed in the literature as one of the most effective solutions for decreasing the greenhouse gas emissions from the building sector. These systems require high investments which are returned through the heat sales. Due to the changed climate conditions and building renovation policies, heat demand in the f...

District heating networks are commonly addressed in the literature as one of the most effective solutions for decreasing the greenhouse gas emissions from the building sector. These systems require high investments which are returned through the heat sales. Due to the changed climate conditions and building renovation policies, heat demand in the f...

Demand response (DR) is often studied from the consumer point of view to achieve economic benefits, especially when dealing with prosumers. However, DR may also be promoted by the grid manager to optimize the supply system. This study aims at addressing the impacts of these possible conflicting perspectives, in isolated microgrids in presence of ce...

District heating networks are commonly addressed in the literature as one of the most effective solutions for decreasing the greenhouse gas emissions from the building sector. These systems require high investments which are returned through the heat sales. Due to the changed climate conditions and building renovation policies, heat demand in the f...

Global household electricity consumption of appliances is anticipated to double by 2030, with most of the growth expected to occur in developing countries. The rising electricity consumption is triggered by population growth, economic development, change in lifestyle and increasing domestic appliance ownership. In Ghana, population is projected to...

This paper performs a multi-national assessment to provide a more comprehensive vision of the potential implementation of Rooftop Greenhouses in retail parks from a theoretical perspective. A geographic information system - life cycle assessment method is used to quantify both the potential and the expected benefits of implementing rooftop greenhou...

Urban energy modelling requires a large amount of detailed data to perform systematic dynamic simulations of a large number of buildings, where the adoption of energy efficiency strategies is an important concern for sustainable urban planning. National statistical datasets collect important aggregated data regarding building construction, energy...

European directives are pushing EU member states to promote energy retrofits of their building stocks. Nevertheless, building renovation stagnates due to many issues, including financial, informational, behavioral, educational and other challenges. All of these increase for the public housing sector, where specific problems such as fuel poverty and...

This work assesses the potential of demand response on isolated hybrid renewable energy systems, in order to optimize the systems' dispatch by minimizing the operation costs and the peak demand. The developed methodology models the implementation of solar thermal systems to replace non-renewable systems for the domestic hot water supply, and a dema...

Approximately 30-40% of the total natural resources that are used in industrialized countries are exploited by the building sector, and almost 40% of the world’s consumption of materials converts into the built environment. Thus, improving the environmental performance of building sector could be crucial for reaching the sustainability of urban env...

District heating networks are commonly addressed in the literature as one of the most effective solutions for decreasing the greenhouse gas emissions from the building sector. These systems require high investments which are returned through the heat sales. Due to the changed climate conditions and building renovation policies, heat demand in the f...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8ssMT9GVIo: This video describes the ongoing scientific work developed under the SusCity Project within the MIT Portugal program. The project is focused on developing and integrating new tools and services to increase urban resource efficiency with minimum environmental impacts, while contributing to promote economi...

Heat demand may decrease in the future due to changing weather conditions and building renovation policies, possibly impacting the efficiency and profitability of renewable heat production and distribution systems which are commonly proposed in the literature as an adequate measure for building sector emissions mitigation. In this work, the potenti...

The necessary simplification of building stock models to perform energy studies in cities can impact their accuracy. This paper assesses the impact of considering different levels of detail in the characterization of the building stock, by varying the number of archetypes considered, using a neighborhood in Lisbon as case-study. Each archetype repr...

District heating networks are commonly addressed in the literature as one of the most effective solutions for decreasing the greenhouse gas emissions from the building sector. These systems require high investments which are returned through the heat sales. Due to the changed climate conditions and building renovation policies, heat demand in the f...

Changed weather conditions (increased outdoor air temperatures and solar radiation levels) caused by the climate change could decrease building heat demand in the future. Furthermore, improved building insulation levels implemented due to the new building energy efficiency legislation could further decrease the demand for heating services. The main...

District heating networks are commonly assumed in the literature as an environmentally friendly solution for providing heating services for the built environment, due to the centralized heat production located outside urban centers and potential utilization of renewable heat sources (solar, geothermal etc.). However, the impacts associated with bot...

This article uses the rice price crisis of 2007–2008 to show how material flow analysis (MFA) can be combined with resilience research. After presentation of fundamental information and methods, resilience-related concepts are illustrated using graphical methods and MFA data. Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) and node-link diagrams are used to highl...

Building sector is currently one of the major sources of CO 2 emissions. Considering that the largest proportion of energy in buildings in Europe is used for heating services, significant potential for emissions decrease could be exploited through heat demand reductions. The scope of this paper is to evaluate the impacts of changed climate and buil...

In Europe, buildings are responsible for 40% of energy consumption and about 35% of the current building stock is over 50 years old. A significant part of this energy consumption is determined by the buildings’ characteristics. However, cities are complex systems with a diverse and very large number of buildings and, as a consequence, the quantific...

In this study, a hybrid power system consisting of PV (Photovoltaics) panels, a wind turbine and a biogas engine is proposed to supply the electricity demand of a village in Kenya. The average and the peak load of the village are around 8 kW and 16.5 kW respectively. The feasibility of using locally produced biogas to drive a backup engine in comp...

Urban metabolism provides a characterization of anthropogenic material flows in urban systems and should contribute to identify the economic activities that were involved on their supply and transformation. Typically, its quantification requires data that is not easily available in different geographies. This paper makes use of a methodology based...

The potential to reschedule part of the electricity demand in energy systems is seen as a significant opportunity to improve the efficiency of the systems, especially on remote and isolated systems. From the supply point of view, that flexibility might bring significant improvements to the generation dispatch, especially when in the presence of ren...

The low interconnection capacities between EU countries has been identified as one of the main issues with the development of an electricity system relying mainly on renewable energy sources. This research work explores the impacts of investing in new interconnection capacity through the application of a TIMES model of Europe considering 18 regions...

The opportunity to improve the overall energy performance of buildings through retrofitting strategies is increasing and becoming more important, once the building stock, mainly in developed cities, is getting old and corresponds to a large share of the built environment. However, there is a vast number of multiple choices of retrofitting measures...

Increasing energy costs, energy consumption and emissions profiles prompted the promotion of different transportation alternatives. This research work addresses the comparison of trip dynamics, energy consumption, CO2 and NOx Well-to-Wheel impacts of 5 transportation alternatives (conventional and electric bicycles, conventional and electric vehicl...

Nearly one and a half billion people in the world do not have access to electricity, and even when energy resources are available, millions of people are unable to pay for them. As so, the access to modern affordable and renewable-based energy services in developing countries is essential to achieve a sustainable development by reducing poverty and...

The design of transition pathways for sustainable electricity systems with high penetrations of renewable energy sources requires the use of energy modeling tools that are able to account for two key aspects: the evolution of fossil fuels and technology prices, and the natural dynamics of renewable resources. However, the modeling methodologies mos...

Throughout the world, but mostly in developing countries, there are presently regions where electricity supply is insufficient or non-existing. Innumerous authors affirm that this lack of access to electricity is a key factor in perpetuating poverty around the world and compromises the socio-economic progress of those places. Thus, improving energy...

This work presents the EFDA Times model (ETM), developed within the European Fusion Development Agreement (EFDA). ETM is an optimization global energy model which aims at providing the optimum energy system composition in terms of social wealth and sustainability including fusion as an alternative technology in the long term. Two framework scenario...

High fuel costs, increasing energy security and concerns with reducing emissions have pushed governments to invest in the use of renewable energies for electricity generation. However, the intermittence of most renewable resources when renewable energy provides a significant share of the energy mix can create problems to electricity grids, which ca...

The identification of energy consumption patterns contributes for the tailoring of energy efficiency solutions. This paper contributes to this issue by addressing the characterization of electricity consumption data with 15 min sampling of twenty two households, in Lisbon. The consumers have been segmented according to: social class, contracted pow...

This work analyzes different modeling methodologies for balancing the electricity supply sources and the electricity demand in systems with high penetration of intermittent renewable energy sources, such as wind and run-of-river hydro. This work also explores the reasons and the circumstances where common balance approaches used by mid- and long-te...

Energy policies are often related to the global effort in reducing greenhouse gas emissions through increased use of renewable energies in electricity production. The impact of these policies is usually calculated by energy planning tools. However, the modeling methodologies most currently used are not adequate to simulate long-term scenarios while...

This paper proposes an integrated modeling framework for energy systems planning, where a TIMES model is used in combination with a half-an-hour resolution model for the system operation developed in MATLAB. The technical and economical feasibility of the long-term scenarios considering the installation of renewable resources plants are tested and...

Fossil fuels make an important contribution to the energy mix in Portugal and have major environmental impacts through the emissions of greenhouse gases. Therefore reducing CO2 emissions in the energy sector has become a major priority for national government. Carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technology has the potential of increasing the fle...

The energy situation in remote islands is becoming critical with high fuel import costs preventing the islands from developing at a faster pace. Sao Miguel is an island located in the middle of the Atlantic with extensive renewable resources whose utilization is limited by low base load levels and lack of storage facilities. Using an economic optim...

The energy problem in autonomous systems, such as islands, promotes the use of renewable forms of energy. The transportation sector, which is a significant part of the energy equation, could allow major breakthroughs by using electric vehicles that can be used for energy storage and sustainable mobility. Current technologies can already be used in...