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Best Practices in Water Asset Utilization for Renewable Energy Generation in Finland, Norway, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Ireland
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This report is published within the Water Asset Renewable Energy Solutions (WARES) project. WARES is a two-year strategic project of the Northern Periphery Programme, which explores the opportunities to generate renewable energy at water utility assets. The project is led by the International Resources and Recycling Institute in Scotland, in partnership with Action Renewables in Northern Ireland, Mayo County Council and Clár-ICH in Ireland, Narvik Science Park and Northern Research Institute in Norway, and the University of Oulu in Finland.
The aim of WARES is to provide innovative renewable energy solutions to remote areas by finding unused opportunities for renewable energy generation within the activities and property of the water sector. WARES will establish partnerships between the water industry and neighbouring communities and help sourcing the capital investment required to commercialise these opportunities, such as creating Public Private Partnerships.
This report briefly outlines different renewable energy technologies, which are currently explored in the water sector. It illustrates good practices of implementation of renewable energy solutions in the Northern Periphery Region. In addition, WARES pilot projects of utilization of water assets for renewable energy generation in Finland, Norway, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Ireland are discussed.
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1 Introduction Acquisition, treatment and distribution of water and wastewater require energy. Conversely, water can also contain kinetic or thermal energy (Siddiqi, et al., 2011). There is a strong relationship between water and energy usage, and the magnitude of energy consumption correlates strongly with water consumption rates (Li, et al., 2013). For instance, wastewater can be a valuable source of energy, but wastewater treatment is also one of the largest energy consumers in the water sector (Frijns, et al., 2011). Therefore, it is useful to consider utilizing the energy content of wastewater at water utilities to provide for own electricity and space heating needs (Latvala, 2009). Simultaneously, this will also lead to the reduction of CO 2 emissions.
1 Introduction Wastewater from the industry and municipalities always contain a certain amount of heat. The temperature of discharged wastewater can be considerably higher and more stable compared to the sourroundigs. Swedish studies have shown that decreasing the temperature of wastewater by one degree by recovering heat can bring 720 GWh of energy savings annu-ally. However, this energy potential is often unused due to the lack of awareness and proper technology. Consequently, heat is discarded to the environment and the embedded energy is wasted. Heat recovery from wastewater could be a considerable source of energy at water utilities. Recovered heat could be utilised for warming the buildings of the water utility or heat-ing water. Processes, such as anaerobic digestion and sludge drying could also benefit from the recovered heat. Furthermore, heat is often being transferred into a district heating system. The use of heat pump technology could also increase the overall efficiency of the heat recov-ery system by being able to provide cooling energy during the summer season (Tekes, 2013).
Climate change and the needed reductions in the use of fossil fuels call for the development of renewable energy sources. However, renewable energy production, such as hydropower (both small- and large-scale) and wind power have adverse impacts on the local environment by causing reductions in biodiversity and loss of habitats and species. This paper compares the environmental impacts of many small-scale hydropower plants with a few large-scale hydropower projects and one wind power farm, based on the same set of environmental parameters; land occupation, reduction in wilderness areas (INON), visibility and impacts on red-listed species. Our basis for comparison was similar energy volumes produced, without considering the quality of the energy services provided.
The results show that small-scale hydropower performs less favourably in all parameters except land occupation. The land occupation of large hydropower and wind power is in the range of 45–50 m2/MWh, which is more than two times larger than the small-scale hydropower, where the large land occupation for large hydropower is explained by the extent of the reservoirs. On all the three other parameters small-scale hydropower performs more than two times worse than both large hydropower and wind power. Wind power compares similarly to large-scale hydropower regarding land occupation, much better on the reduction in INON areas, and in the same range regarding red-listed species. Our results demonstrate that the selected four parameters provide a basis for further development of a fair and consistent comparison of impacts between the analysed renewable technologies.
This article in accordance with the principle of photovoltaic solar energy conversion, and focus on building solar installations a combination of various components analysis of the way, made a number of solar photovoltaic installations combined with the construction solution to the problem. And from architectural aesthetics and construction techniques discussed both the combination of solar energy and architecture, as well as to further promote the use of solar installations in Hebei Province.
The paper presents the results of a pilot- and full-scale experimental campaign on the anaerobic co-digestion of waste activated sludge and biowaste both in mesophilic and thermophilic conditions. The study demonstrated the possibility to increase the specific biogas production from 0.34 to 0.49 m3/kgTVS and the gas production rate from 0.53 to 0.78 m3per m3 of reactor per day changing the reactor temperature from the mesophilic (37 °C) to the thermophilic (55 °C) range. The experimental work was carried out at pilot-scale, and the results match the full-scale behaviour. Ammonia nitrogen recycled from the anaerobic digestion section to the wastewater treatment plant accounted for about 4% of the total nitrogen loading. Digestate characteristics in terms of biological stability and heavy metals content suggested the opportunity of a short time post-aerobic stabilisation, leading to a high quality compost product. © 2013 Elsevier Ltd.
Turbine types suit specific ranges of head, flow rate and shaft speed and are categorised by specific speed. In the pico range, under 5kW, the requirements are often different to that of larger scale turbines and qualitative requirements become more influential. Pico hydro turbines can be applied beyond these conventional application domains, for example at reduced heads, by using non-traditional components such as low speed generators. This paper describes a method to select which turbine architecture is most appropriate for a low-head pico hydro specification using quantitative and qualitative analyses of 13 turbine system architectures found in literature. Quantitative and qualitative selection criteria are determined from the particular requirements of the end user. The individual scores from this analysis are weighted based on perceived relative importance of each of the criteria against the original specification and selects a turbine variant based on the total weighted score. This methodology is applied to an example of a remote site, low head and variable flow specification and used to select a propeller turbine variant or single-jet Turgo turbine for this specification.