Browsing by Subject "Alternative energy"
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Item A feasibility study on utility-scale solar integration in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia(2010-05) Krishnamoorthy, Barthram; Spence, David B.; Howari, Fares M.Due to the vast fossil fuel wealth, the country of Saudi Arabia is experiencing a dramatic growth in both population and GDP. Therefore there is a growing demand for water and energy to meet these needs. All of the electricity that is generated is sourced from crude oil and natural gas. All natural gas production is used domestically and there are no net imports or exports. Due to many constrains on the natural gas supply, there is a slow shift in the generation mix going towards crude oil based power generation. This study assessed the viability of utility scale solar integration into the Saudi Arabian electric mix to potentially relieve some demand pressure for natural gas consumption as well as reduce green house gas emissions. Parabolic trough concentrated solar power technology was chosen as the primary technology for utility scale integration. A total of five scenarios were calculated. The scenarios include the following, base case, 5%, 10%, 15%, 20% solar integration in terms of installed capacity. Two sets of net present values were calculated. The net present values of each scenario were calculated. A second set of net present values was calculated with a projected increase in electricity prices. The natural gas and crude oil offset from the four solar integration scenarios were calculated using the base case forecasted natural gas and crude oil consumption from power generation. As expected, natural gas and crude oil consumption decreased when there was an increase in solar integration. The expected carbon dioxide offsets were calculated for each scenario. There was a decrease in carbon dioxide emission as solar integration was increased. Finally, all of these analyses were used as criteria for a decision analysis using the analytical hierarchy process. Depending on the decision maker’s importance on the determined criteria, solar integration in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is achievable.Item Unruly energies : provocations of renewable energy development in a northern German village(2014-08) Carlson, Jennifer D.; Stewart, Kathleen, 1953-This dissertation asks how inhabitants of a sustainable village are living out Germany’s transition from nuclear to renewable energy. The sustainable village remains a locus of optimistic attachments for renewable energy advocates, who argue that a decentralized power grid will enable people to more directly participate in power production and politics as “energy citizens.” Yet while rural areas have become sites of speculation, innovation and growth, few rural-dwellers are enfranchised in (or profiting from) the technoscientific projects in their midst. I draw upon 13 months of fieldwork in a northern German village transformed by wind turbines, photovoltaics and biofuels to consider why, asking what kinds of public life flourish in the absence of democratic engagement with renewable technologies. This ethnography engages the village as multiply constituted across domains of everyday life, including transit, farming, waste management, domestic life, and social gatherings. I found that environmental policy, everyday practices, and the area’s material histories combined to produce ontologies—senses of what exists—that circumscribe citizen participation in the energy sector, affording more formal opportunities to men than to women, and privileging farmers’ interests in plans that impacted the larger community. These findings illuminate how many villagers become ambivalent toward the project of the energy transition and disenfranchised from its implementation. Yet many who were excluded from formal participation also engaged with renewable technologies as they sensed out their worlds, using tropes of sustainable energy and technoscientific materials to place themselves in this emerging energy polity. Their everyday worldmaking brimmed with what I call unruly energies, structures of feeling that registered more as affects than as discourse. In the village, these took form as sensory disturbances, disquiet among neighbors, technoscientific optimism and skepticism toward environmental policy. These affective modes of attention, investment and participation were vital aspects of public life that shaped the transition’s unfolding. They exceeded liberal models of renewable energy citizenship, which presume that socioeconomic interest and environmental commitment are universal among citizens. In this way, unruly energies compel more nuanced attention to the multiple, contingent, site-specific ways in which citizenship takes form in the making of eco-capitalist energy infrastructure.