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This paper proposes a novel hybrid marine renewable energy-harvesting system to increase energy production, reduce levelized costs of energy and promote renewable marine energy. Firstly, various marine renewable energy resources and state-of-art technologies for energy exploitation and storage were reviewed. The site selection criteria for each energy-harvesting approach were identified, and a scoring matrix for site selection was proposed to screen suitable locations for the hybrid system. The Triton Knoll wind farm was used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the scoring matrix. An integrated energy system was designed, and FE modeling was performed to assess the effects of additional energy devices on the structural stability of the main wind turbine structure. It has been proven that the additional energy structures have a negligible influence on foundation/structure deflection (<1%) and increased system natural frequency by 6%; thus, they have a minimum influence on the original wind system but increased energy yield. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Solar energy is considered one of the most hopeful alternative sources to avoiding dependence on fossil fuels, and it does not cause any air pollution. GIS-based solar energy potential evaluation is mainly focused on regional scale; further, more solar energy potential evaluation with building scale is calculated through observation data and mathematical model. Therefore, in this paper, a GIS-based joint solar energy potential evaluation is developed to evaluate the distributed photovoltaic potential and centralized photovoltaic potential. Shanxi province in China, which has abundant coal resources, is used as the study area. The raster grid scale is used as the minimum research scale, which could not only deal with the distributed photovoltaic potential but could also calculate the centralized photovoltaic potential. The obtained results indicate that the developed method could effectively deal with problems associated with the distributed photovoltaic potential and centralized photovoltaic potential in the raster grid scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Selecting an appropriate wind farm location must be specific to a particular administrative region, which involves restrictions balance and trade-offs. Multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) and GIS are widely used in wind energy planning, but have failed to achieve the selection of an optimal location and make it difficult to establish a set of independent factors. Fuzzy measurement is an effective method to evaluate intermediate synthesis and calculates the factor weight through fuzzy integrals. In this paper, optimal wind farm location is analyzed through coupling Grid GIS technique with λ fuzzy measure. Dalian City is selected as the study area for proving the feasibility of the proposed method. Typography, meteorological, transmission facilities, biological passage, and infrastructure are taken into the index system. All the indexes are specialized into victor grid cells which are taken as the base wind farm location alternative unit. The results indicate that the Grid GIS based λ fuzzy measure and Choquet fuzzy integral method could effectively deal with the special optimization problem and reflect optimal wind farm locations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Groundwater heat pump (GWHP) systems are acknowledged as renewable and sustainable energy sources that can effectively fulfill the heating and cooling requirements of buildings on a district level. These systems harness geothermal sources available at shallow depths. To ensure the long-term sustainability of the system, the thermally used water is generally reinjected into the aquifer, creating a thermal plume starting from the injection well. Over time, this thermal plume may reach the abstraction well in the long term, potentially leading to a reduction in system efficiency. The operation types have a significant impact on this matter, and their effects have not been extensively studied in the existing literature. Therefore, this study aims to determine the optimal operating configurations for the Northern Gateway Heat Network, a GWHP system established in Colchester, UK. In this study, four distinct operation types are considered: (1) continuous heating (actual system), (2) heating and recovery, (3) heating and cooling, and (4) aquifer thermal energy storage (ATES). The results indicate that ATES operation yields the highest thermal energy output due to its ability to benefit from stored energy from the previous operation. However, implementing the ATES system may encounter challenges due to factors such as well development, hydraulic conductivity, and hydraulic gradient. On the other hand, implementing heating and cooling operations does not require additional considerations and offers not only free cooling to buildings but also a delay in thermal feedback time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using low-temperature (shallow) groundwater as a heat source or heat sink is a common practice to supply space heating or cooling, especially in the United States, Canada, China, and several European countries. The groundwater heat pump (GWHP) system has been extensively studied in recent decades using numerical approaches, which have some limitations in understanding the soil's thermal behavior. Therefore, a laboratory-scale experimental study involving cooling tests was carried out to investigate the impact of GWHP on system performance and sustainability with varying groundwater flow velocities and injection and abstraction rates. The results demonstrated that groundwater flow velocity, as well as injection and abstraction rates, significantly impact thermal plume development. Higher injection and abstraction rates create a larger thermal plume, thereby decreasing abstraction temperature. However, groundwater flow prevents heat development around the well by dispersing the heat in the groundwater flow direction. Furthermore, the results indicate that the energy gain only increased by 81% and 107%, with a respective increase of 100% and 200% in injection and abstraction rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]