Renewable Energy
Basic Assessment Study: Purpose
The aim of this report is to enable clients to make an informed judgement about which of the various renewable and LZC (low and zero carbon) technology options is most suitable for their particular circumstances. A basic assessment is often carried out at the design stage of a project, or as part of a planning application. The assessment considers the following technologies:
If you're thinking about installing a small or medium-sized wind generator at your home or business, it makes sense to get some idea of how much power you can expect.
The precise determination of the wind resource at a given site is one of the most important aspects in the development of a wind energy project.
For large-scale projects a project developer would normally take at least a full year of wind measurements at the exact location where the wind energy project is going to be installed, but this is expensive. A pre-feasibility study will indicate whether a proposed wind energy project could be financially viable, saving unnecessary expenditure and time.
For very small-scale projects (e.g. off-grid battery charging and water pumping), the cost of wind monitoring could actually be higher than the cost to purchase and install a small wind turbine. In this case a detailed wind resource assessment would normally not be completed.
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PV is shorthand for 'PhotoVoltaics', a term which covers the conversion of light into electricity. Like wind projects, PV projects rely on accurate computer models to predict the likely annual energy yield to help determine annual income and whether or not a project will be cost-effective.
The 3 basic applications that we can evaluate with the PV model are:
(i) On-grid, or grid-connected applications
(ii) Off-grid applications, which include both stand-alone (PV-battery) systems and hybrid (PV-battery-generator) systems
(iii) Water pumping applications, which include PV-pump systems
A tilted irradiance calculation algorithm (using an hourly interval) and PV array model are common to all applications.
Grants, loans and income from electricity generated (e.g. feed in tariff, or FITs in the UK) are all accounted for in model.
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The most common applications for solar water heating are domestic hot water and swimming pools, but it can also find uses providing process hot water for commercial and industrial applications, for example hotels, laundries, car washes, and make-up of hot process water.
Annual performance of a solar water heating system with a storage tank is dependent on system characteristics, solar radiation available, ambient air temperature and on heating load characteristics. The models we use have been validated against installed systems and shown to be within +/- 15% of actual yields.
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Humans have been burning biomass since the discovery of fire. Biomass heating systems burn plant or other organic matter—such as wood chips, agricultural residues or even municipal waste—to generate heat.
Emphasis on renewable energy resources as replacements for fossil fuels and concerns about greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions has resulted in a resurgence of interest in biomass heating, where the biomass is harvested in a sustainable manner.
In a typical heating system the boiler is sized to meet the peak heat demand - this only occurs for a relatively short time each year (e.g. 5%) - the rest of the time the boiler operates less efficiently under part-load conditons.
Our study will inform you the peak heating load, annual heating energy demand, annual fuel consumption and costs. It provides a comparison between existing (or alternative) fossil fuels and the biomass fuel. We can model individual buildings or heat networks, single or multi-fuel.
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The principle behind combined heat and power (or 'cogeneration') is to recover the waste
heat generated by the combustion of a fuel in an electricity generation system. This heat is
often rejected to the environment, thereby wasting a significant portion of the energy available
in the fuel that can otherwise be used for space heating and cooling, water heating,
and industrial process heat and cooling loads in the vicinity of the plant. Cogeneration
of electricity and heat greatly increases the overall efficiency of the system, anywhere from
25-55% to 60-90%, depending on the equipment used and the application. Heat may be recovered and
distributed as steam (e.g. industrial processes that need high temperature heat) often required in thermal loads that need high temperature heat,
such as industrial processes), or as hot water for domestic hot water, or for space heating.
We can model any one, or combination, of the following applications with a wide range of renewable and non-renewable fuels:
power; heating; cooling; single buildings
or multiple buildings; industrial processes; communities; district heating
and district cooling.
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