Decarbonize Urban Heating System


Book Description

This is an open access book. The double-carbon target has been one of the main motivations and goals for China's social and economic development. The building sector is one of the most important sectors to achieve energy saving and emission reduction. This publication thoroughly examines China's building energy use and carbon emissions with a focus on four categories, including their characteristics and the technologies needed to achieve zero carbon emissions. This year, the key issue is developing carbon-neutrality pathways for China's urban heating system. This report comprehensively discusses the current status and future forecast of heat demand in buildings and non-process industries, introduces the challenges facing the urban energy supply system in achieving carbon neutrality, and elucidates the low-carbon heating model based mainly on low-grade and low-carbon waste heat. Extensive survey and monitoring data and case studies are presented throughout the book. The discussion of technologies and policies has been the subject of extensive research and evidence for over a decade. The information, data, and policy recommendations are of relevance to a national and global audience working in the fields of energy, climate change, engineering, and building science.




Decarbonizing Development


Book Description

The science is unequivocal: stabilizing climate change implies bringing net carbon emissions to zero. This must be done by 2100 if we are to keep climate change anywhere near the 2oC warming that world leaders have set as the maximum acceptable limit. Decarbonizing Development: Three Steps to a Zero-Carbon Future looks at what it would take to decarbonize the world economy by 2100 in a way that is compatible with countries' broader development goals. Here is what needs to be done: -Act early with an eye on the end-goal. To best achieve a given reduction in emissions in 2030 depends on whether this is the final target or a step towards zero net emissions. -Go beyond prices with a policy package that triggers changes in investment patterns, technologies and behaviors. Carbon pricing is necessary for an efficient transition toward decarbonization. It is an efficient way to raise revenue, which can be used to support poverty reduction or reduce other taxes. Policymakers need to adopt measures that trigger the required changes in investment patterns, behaviors, and technologies - and if carbon pricing is temporarily impossible, use these measures as a substitute. -Mind the political economy and smooth the transition for those who stand to be most affected. Reforms live or die based on the political economy. A climate policy package must be attractive to a majority of voters and avoid impacts that appear unfair or are concentrated on a region, sector or community. Reforms have to smooth the transition for those who stand to be affected, by protecting vulnerable people but also sometimes compensating powerful lobbies.




Low Carbon Mobility Transitions


Book Description

A thorough examination of how methods of low-carbon transport can be implemented using international case studies, with contributions from recognised industry experts, academics and policy makers.




Accelerating Decarbonization of the U.S. Energy System


Book Description

The world is transforming its energy system from one dominated by fossil fuel combustion to one with net-zero emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), the primary anthropogenic greenhouse gas. This energy transition is critical to mitigating climate change, protecting human health, and revitalizing the U.S. economy. To help policymakers, businesses, communities, and the public better understand what a net-zero transition would mean for the United States, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine convened a committee of experts to investigate how the U.S. could best decarbonize its transportation, electricity, buildings, and industrial sectors. This report, Accelerating Decarbonization of the United States Energy System, identifies key technological and socio-economic goals that must be achieved to put the United States on the path to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. The report presents a policy blueprint outlining critical near-term actions for the first decade (2021-2030) of this 30-year effort, including ways to support communities that will be most impacted by the transition.




Digital Decarbonization


Book Description

As energy industries produce ever more data, firms are harnessing greater computing power, advances in data science, and increased digital connectivity to exploit that data. These trends have the potential to transform the way energy is produced, transported, and consumed.




Sustainable Development Of Energy, Water And Environment Systems - Proceedings Of The 3rd Dubrovnik Conference


Book Description

Sustainability is a new, important discourse aimed at promoting a new strategy in the development of energy, water and environmental (EWE) systems — the key components that affect the quality of life on our planet. It is becoming increasingly clear that the quest for sustainable development requires integrating economic, social, cultural, political and ecological factors. The behavior and properties of an EWE system arise not merely from the properties of its component elements, but also to a large degree also from the nature and intensity of their dynamic interlinkages. This volume helps clarify the complexity of these problems by providing a deeper understanding of the implications of the different aspects of sustainability.This work contains a collection of selected, peer-reviewed and state-of-the-art reflecting papers that were presented at the Third Dubrovnik Conference on Sustainable Development of Energy, Water and Environment Systems that was held in June 5-10, 2005 in Dubrovnik, Croatia.




Renewable Energy in District Heating and Cooling


Book Description

District heating and cooling (DHC) combined with renewable energy sources can help meet rising urban energy needs, improve efficiency, reduce emissions and improve local air quality. Although currently dominated by fossil fuels such as coal and gas, DHC systems can be upgraded, or new networks created, to use solid biofuel, solar and geothermal energy technologies. Depending on local conditions, renewable-based DHC brings a range of benefits, including increased energy security, improved health and reduced climate impact.To date, only a few countries have taken advantage of their renewable resource potential for DHC or created policies to promote further uptake. Sweden and Switzerland have started promoting renewable-based district heating,while Denmark - with ambitious decarbonisation policies -already uses high shares. Many cities and regions envisage a growing role for district in their energy plans; some are also looking increasingly at district cooling.As this REmap sector study from the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) shows, renewables could feasibly supply more than one fifth of the energy needed for DHC worldwide. But to drive the transition, policy makers need to fully understand the costs, bene¿ts and actual potential for renewable-based DHC.




Digital Decarbonization


Book Description

Decarbonization through optimized energy flows. In this book you will learn how a significant reduction in climate changing greenhouse gas emissions can be achieved through systemic optimization of our energy systems. The authors clearly demonstrate how energy-intensive processes can be optimized flexibly by using technology-neutral simulation methods to ensure that significantly fewer greenhouse gases are emitted. Such field-tested, data-based energy models described in this publication prove that "digital decarbonization" enables an economy that releases significantly fewer climate changing emissions while maintaining its production output. This is a promising message in view of ongoing climate change.




Settling Climate Accounts


Book Description

As drivers of climate action enter the fourth decade of what has become a multi-stage race, Net Zero has emerged as the dominant organizing principle. Hundreds of corporations and investors worldwide, together responsible for assets in the tens of trillions of dollars, are lining-up for the UN Race to Zero. This latest stage in the race to save civilization from heat, drought, fires, and floods, is defined by steering toward zeroing out greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Settling Climate Accounts probes the practice of Net Zero finance. It elucidates both the state of play and a set of directions that help form judgements about whether Net Zero is going to carry climate action far enough. The book delves into technical analyses and activates the reader’s imagination with narrative accounts of climate action past, present, and future. Settling Climate Accounts is edited and authored by Stanford University faculty and researchers. The first part of the book investigates the rough edges of Net Zero in practice, exploring questions of hedging risk, Scope 3 emissions, greenwashing, and the business of asset management. The second half looks at states, markets, and transitions through the lenses of blended finance, offsets, debt, and securitization. The editors tease out possible solutions and raise further questions about the adequacy and reach of the Net Zero agenda. To effectively navigate the road ahead, the editors call out the need for accountability and ask: who is in charge of making Net Zero add up? Settling Climate Accounts offers context and foundation to ground the rapidly evolving practice of Net Zero finance. Targeted at seasoned practitioners, newly activated leaders, educators, and students of climate action the world over, this book embraces the complexity of climate action and, in so doing, proposes to animate and drive hope.




Drawdown


Book Description

• New York Times bestseller • The 100 most substantive solutions to reverse global warming, based on meticulous research by leading scientists and policymakers around the world “At this point in time, the Drawdown book is exactly what is needed; a credible, conservative solution-by-solution narrative that we can do it. Reading it is an effective inoculation against the widespread perception of doom that humanity cannot and will not solve the climate crisis. Reported by-effects include increased determination and a sense of grounded hope.” —Per Espen Stoknes, Author, What We Think About When We Try Not To Think About Global Warming “There’s been no real way for ordinary people to get an understanding of what they can do and what impact it can have. There remains no single, comprehensive, reliable compendium of carbon-reduction solutions across sectors. At least until now. . . . The public is hungry for this kind of practical wisdom.” —David Roberts, Vox “This is the ideal environmental sciences textbook—only it is too interesting and inspiring to be called a textbook.” —Peter Kareiva, Director of the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, UCLA In the face of widespread fear and apathy, an international coalition of researchers, professionals, and scientists have come together to offer a set of realistic and bold solutions to climate change. One hundred techniques and practices are described here—some are well known; some you may have never heard of. They range from clean energy to educating girls in lower-income countries to land use practices that pull carbon out of the air. The solutions exist, are economically viable, and communities throughout the world are currently enacting them with skill and determination. If deployed collectively on a global scale over the next thirty years, they represent a credible path forward, not just to slow the earth’s warming but to reach drawdown, that point in time when greenhouse gases in the atmosphere peak and begin to decline. These measures promise cascading benefits to human health, security, prosperity, and well-being—giving us every reason to see this planetary crisis as an opportunity to create a just and livable world.