Renewable Energy Resources and Technologies
Setare Peirow; Fatemeh Razi Astaraei; Amir Ali Saifoddin; Hossein Yousefi
Abstract
The issue of power supply in hospitals is of special importance because of its direct effect on people's health conditions and vital treatment and care measures. Hospitals are among buildings with high energy consumption. The possibility of using renewable sources in their energy supply is one of the ...
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The issue of power supply in hospitals is of special importance because of its direct effect on people's health conditions and vital treatment and care measures. Hospitals are among buildings with high energy consumption. The possibility of using renewable sources in their energy supply is one of the issues and challenges that specialists encounter. This paper discusses the possibility of installing a small solar power generation unit on a hospital rooftop to improve the quality of power supply systems. The case study is a hospital located in Tehran, Iran. For this purpose, the hospital energy system was modeled with the Design-Builder software. The obtained results were validated based on the actual consumption of the model specified in the hospital energy bills. According to the modeling step results, the annual consumption of the current energy system was 3.08 GWh of electricity and 4.23 GWh of gas. In the second step, a renewable power generation unit consisting of photovoltaic panels and battery was designed for the hospital's roof using PVsyst software. The designed power generation unit could produce 132 MWh of solar energy per year, of which 85 MWh may be sold to the main grid. The techno-economic and environmental feasibility study for the proposed system was performed using HOMER Pro software. The evaluation results revealed that considering the 20-year lifetime of the project, the proposed system achieved a lower energy cost and lower net present cost than the current system. Environmental assessment of the model by considering emission penalty indicated that the proposed system emitted fewer pollutant gases into the environment than the current system. Sensitivity analysis was also applied to investigate the effect of discounting and diesel fuel price variation on the system’s energy cost. According to the results, a 4 % increase in the discount rate leads to a 14 % growth in the cost of energy for the project. Also, there was a direct relation between enhancement of the expected inflation rate and raising the net present cost of the project.
Renewable Energy Economics, Policies and Planning
Younes Noorollahi; Fatemeh Pourghasem; Hossein Yousefi
Abstract
Baseline data represent one of the important stages of Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) procedure that describes the existing environment of the study area and surrounding areas in enough detail to allow the environmental impacts of the proposed area to be accurately and adequately assessed, and ...
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Baseline data represent one of the important stages of Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) procedure that describes the existing environment of the study area and surrounding areas in enough detail to allow the environmental impacts of the proposed area to be accurately and adequately assessed, and future changes and effects can be measured. Baseline data may be inaccurate, difficult to obtain or non-existent in Iran as a developing country, and it involves huge and diverse environmental data of a spatial nature in the EIA process. Therefore, a useful and effective geographic information system (GIS) approach is developed to integrate geodatabase by acquiring and handling environmental data from different sources related to the proposed project area for the EIA procedure. Based on this approach, a comprehensive geodatabase for baseline data of EIA procedure, called Baseline Geodatabase (BGDB), is designed. The BGDB includes feature datasets (projects, climatology and air quality, hydrology, pedology, general location map of the study area, geology, noise, biology, and socio-economic-cultural data) and tables (fauna). For example, the BGDB for Sabalan geothermal project area, Iran as a case study is developed. This paper provides a practical tool to facilitate the EIA process, environmentally sustainable management, and to support decision-making for environmental specialists and managers in the present and future of the proposed project area.