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The objective of this paper is to illustrate the main results of a German case study on citizen awareness and habits regarding sustainability, energy consumption and related public policies. A specific methodological tool, called STAVE, has been developed in order to create evidence about citizens’ daily energy-related behaviour at home and to investigate their motives, activities and obstacles as to saving energy. The results show how participants are aware that energy use is strongly linked to environmental issues and climate change. Moreover, they are able to deliver a rich picture of their everyday energy use at home including motives and barriers to save energy. Another major topic that goes beyond reasoning about energy use at home is the question of the social aspects of sustainability. Thus, there were interactions about the connections between social status and the opportunity to engage in a sustainable lifestyle. In this sense, the methodology used allows raising some contradictions and paradoxes among participant discourses, and it seems clear that to live in a sustainable way is a major challenge for participants. According to the recent literature, the need for a means to support policy making for sustainability by exploring the complexities of environment-related citizen behaviours is evident. In this sense, the STAVE method provides a procedure and a set of techniques that can be used in different ways to investigate and explore the patterns of sustainability-related practical reasoning and practical action deployed by citizens across a broad range of real-world settings.

This paper analyses the gross inland energy consumption (EC) in the European Union countries (EU-15) over the period 2005-2014. The standard tools in the measurement of income inequality such as Lorenz curves, Gini index, Generalized Entropy indices and Atkinson ones are applied. Our empirical results, obtained through the decomposition of the generalized entropy indices, confirm that there are a small inward shift in the corresponding Lorenz curves, that the inequality distribution of EC across the EU-15 countries has decreased (the Gini coefficient falls from 44,27% in 2005 to 42,16% in 2014) and there are huge differences among the countries’ clusters: Mediterranean, Continental, Nordic and Anglo-Saxon. This paper makes a good contribution to knowledge since it uses a very up-to-dated database (Eurostat) and fills a gap in the literature.

Internet of Things is a highly applicable technology due to its versatility in areas such as agronomy, health applications, and industry. Besides, portability makes these devices affordable. IoT development boards communicate through Wi-Fi transmitted messages via the Internet, depending on the inner workings of the IoT development board, energy consumption can vary in such transmission. Furthermore, this consumption could change if the board is powered by different power supplies and the quantity of Wi-Fi transmitted messages. This paper provides a methodology to acquire an energy profile when sending data (byte) using Message Queue Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol on DEVKIT V1 NodeMCU-32 (ESP32) development board. Three different power supplies were used for the board, a 3.7 LiPo Battery, 5v usb Power bank and 9V NiMh rechargeable battery. The higher current consumption obtained was using a 3.7 battery, followed by 5v and the lowest current consumption was when using 9v. However, results demonstrate that when using the 9v power supply the energy consumption is two times higher than using 3.7v. Therefore, the best voltage source for transmission and energy consumption using a NodeMCU-32 development board will be 3.7 volts.

ABSTRACT This paper presents a new approach to properly estimate energy consumption inside a greenhouse. In this study, we have adopted improved classical modelling to evaluate the energy balance of a greenhouse with a higher precision. While the traditional classical model focuses mainly on the cooling and heating (and denies the deep influence of lighting factors), we demonstrate the importance of considering these three necessary components as being interdependent through this academic study; they should all be integrated in order to reach optimal crop production and efficient energy consumption. Our contribution will be to improve the traditional classical model and to demonstrate that daylight, as well as artificial lighting, has fundamental consequences on the estimating of the required energy consumption and the choice of the optimal shape and coverage material of the greenhouse.

This work addresses the deployment problem in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) by hybridizing two metaheuristics, namely the Bees Algorithm (BA) and the Grasshopper Optimization Algorithm (GOA). The BA is an optimization algorithm that demonstrated promising results in solving many engineering problems. However, the local search process of BA lacks efficient exploitation due to the random assignment of search agents inside the neighborhoods, which weakens the algorithm’s accuracy and results in slow convergence especially when solving higher dimension problems. To alleviate this shortcoming, this paper proposes a hybrid algorithm that utilizes the strength of the GOA to enhance the exploitation phase of the BA. To prove the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, it is applied for WSNs deployment optimization with various deployment settings. Results demonstrate that the proposed hybrid algorithm can optimize the deployment of WSN and outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of coverage, overlapping area, average moving distance, and energy consumption.

This paper presents the training of an artificial neural network using consumption data measured in the metropolitan network of Valencia, Spain, to estimate the energy consumption of a metro system. After calibration and validation of the neural network, the results obtained show that it can be used to predict energy consumption with high accuracy. Once fully trained, the neural network is used for testing hypothetical operational scenarios aimed to reduce the energy consumption of a metro system. These operational scenarios include different vertical alignments that prove that Symmetric Vertical Sinusoid Alignments (SVSA) can reduce energy consumption by 18.41% in contrast to a flat (0% gradient) alignment.

Resumen En el presente trabajo se diseñó y aplicó un procedimiento para la planificación energética teniendo en cuenta los requerimientos de la NC-ISO 50001: 2011 “Gestión de la energía”. El diseño tuvo como premisas requisitos de las normas internacionales relacionadas con la gestión de la energía ISO 50001: 2011, UNE 216301: 2007, DIN EN 16001, ANSI/ MSE 2000: 2008 y de gestión de la calidad ISO 9001: 2008. Para la aplicación se seleccionó como caso de estudio la Empresa Oleohidráulica Cienfuegos, utilizándose herramientas y técnicas tales como: trabajo con expertos, revisión de documentos, las herramientas de la Tecnología de Gestión Total Eficiente de la Energía y de Calidad, obteniéndose como resultados la planificación energética a través de la determinación de la estructura de consumo energético, las áreas de consumo significativo, lo que conllevó a establecer la línea base y meta energética de la organización. Abstract In this paper we designed and implemented a process for considering energy planning requirements of the NC-ISO 50001: 2011 ¨Energy Management¨. The premise was to design requirements of international standards related to energy management ISO 50001: 2011, UNE 216301: 2007, DIN EN 16001, ANSI / MSE 2000: 2008 and quality management ISO 9001: 2008. For application was selected as a case study Hydraulics Company Cienfuegos, using tools and techniques such as: working with experts, review of documents, tools Total Technology Management Energy Efficient and quality, obtaining as results the energy planning, through the determination of the structure of energy consumption, significant consumption areas, which led to establish base line and energy goal of the organization.

This paper analyses how energy consumption and energy efficiency evolved in the Spanish ceramic tile industry in the 20th century and explores the emerging possibilities in the 21st century. In the last century, the tile industry undertook three radical transitions by switching from traditional biomass fuels to liquid hydrocarbon fuels (fuel oil and gas oil), and subsequently to gas fuels, mainly involving natural gas. Although it is difficult to obtain the information that enable the real energy efficiency in manufacturing plants to be reliably evaluated, the available data indicate that a high degree of efficiency has been achieved with current manufacturing technologies. Consequently, significant developments in this sense are not expected, even though efforts are still being made to reduce energy consumption in the production process. However, environmental regulations and impacts, and the emerging new energy sources based on agricultural biomass could open up new avenues for energy supply in the Spanish ceramic tile cluster.El presente texto analiza cómo ha ido evolucionando el consumo y la eficiencia energética de la industria española de baldosas cerámicas durante el siglo XX, y explora las posibilidades que se le plantean en el siglo XXI. Durante el pasado siglo este sector industrial acometió tres transiciones radicales al pasar de los combustibles tradicionales de biomasa a los hidrocarburos líquidos (fuelóleo y gasóleo), y posteriormente a los gaseosos, principalmente gas natural. Aunque la información que permite evaluar de manera fiable la eficiencia energética real en las plantas de fabricación no es fácil de obtener, los datos disponibles indican que se ha llegado a una elevada eficiencia con las tecnologías productivas actualmente utilizadas. Por tanto no se prevén cambios importantes en este aspecto, aunque siguen realizándose esfuerzos encaminados a reducir el consumo de energía en el proceso productivo. Sin embargo, los impactos y las regulaciones medioambientales, y nuevas posibles fuentes energéticas basadas en biomasa agrícola pueden abrir paso a nuevas vías de suministro energético en el sector cerámico español de baldosas.