Related papers: Meeting Energy Needs by Balancing Cost and Sustain…
Humans spend over 90% of their time in buildings which account for 40% of anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, making buildings the leading cause of climate change. To incentivize more sustainable construction, building codes are…
Climate change is a major impending threat to the future of humanity. According to the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), our emissions are estimated to have caused 0.8 deg C-1.2 deg C of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) above…
Residential heating, primarily powered by natural gas, accounts for a significant portion of residential sector energy use and carbon emissions in many parts of the world. Hence, there is a push towards decarbonizing residential heating by…
In the course of the energy transition, energy generation from nuclear power - through nuclear fission and perhaps in the future through nuclear fusion - is often proposed as an alternative or supplement to renewable energy sources. There…
Global warming is endangering the earth's ecosystem. It is imperative for us to limit green house gas emissions in order to combat rising global average temperatures. One way to move forward is the integration of renewable energy resources…
Major innovations in computing have been driven by scaling up computing infrastructure, while aggressively optimizing operating costs. The result is a network of worldwide datacenters that consume a large amount of energy, mostly in an…
The logistic function is used to forecast energy consumed worldwide and oil production in the U.S. The logistic substitution model is used to describe the energy mix since 1965 presenting a picture significantly different from the one…
Global sustainability relies on our capacity of understanding and guiding urban systems, and their metabolism, in an adequate way. It has been proposed that bigger and denser cities are more resource-efficient than smaller ones because they…
Climate change has become intertwined with the global economy. Here, we describe the importance of inertia to continued growth in energy consumption. Drawing from thermodynamic arguments, and using 38 years of available statistics between…
The use of wind and solar generation is fundamental to the decarbonisation of the United Kingdom electricity system. However, the optimal level of renewable energy as a proportion of total demand is still being debated. In this paper,…
Fossil gas is sometimes presented as an enabler of variable solar and wind generation beyond 2050, despite being a primary source of greenhouse gas emissions from methane leakage and combustion. We find that balancing solar and wind…
Land use is a critical factor in the siting of renewable energy facilities and is often scrutinized due to perceived conflicts with other land demands. Meanwhile, substantial areas are devoted to activities such as golf, which are…
The regulations regarding the Paris Agreement are planned to be adapted soon to keep the global temperature rise within 2 0C. Additionally, integrating renewable energy-based equipment and adopting new ways of producing energy resources,…
Renewable Energies (RE) have gained more attention in recent years since they offer clean and sustainable energy. One of the major sustainable development goals (SDG-7) set by the United Nations (UN) is to achieve affordable and clean…
Each day the world inches closer to a climate catastrophe and a sustainability revolution. To avoid the former and achieve the latter we must transform our use of energy. Surprisingly, today's growing problem is that there is too much wind…
Heat extremes are projected to severely impact humanity and with increasing geographic disparities. Global South countries are more exposed to heat extremes and have reduced adaptation capacity. One documented source of such adaptation…
Decarbonizing the energy sector is one of the main challenges to combat the climate crisis. Cities play an important role to reach climate neutrality as more than 70% of global CO2 emissions originate from urban areas. Decarbonization of…
Cost optimal scenarios derived from models of a highly renewable electricity system depend on the specific input data, cost assumptions and system constraints. Here this influence is studied using a techno-economic optimisation model for a…
Energy technologies emitting differing proportions of methane and carbon dioxide vary in their relative climate impacts over time, due to the different atmospheric lifetimes of the two gases. Standard technology comparisons using the global…
We have assembled CO2 emission figures from collections of urban GHG emission estimates published in peer reviewed journals or reports from research institutes and non-governmental organizations. Analyzing the scaling with population size…