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The development of photovoltaic industry can effectively alleviate the energy crisis and environmental pollution. The deployment of photovoltaic power stations along the high-speed railway is a new mode combining photovoltaic new energy with infrastructure. This paper constructs a comprehensive decision-making framework for the site selection of PV power station along high-speed railway combining the subjective method and the objective method. A scientific and reasonable evaluation index system comprehensively considering multiple factors is constructed in this framework. Analytic hierarchy process and Entropy weight method are combined to determine the weight of every index, which combines the expert knowledge and data information effectively, relatively reducing systematic error and random error. Grey relational analysis is used to choose scheme among several alternatives, which greatly deal with the strong grey correlations among indexes. The framework established in this paper is used to select PV power stations along the Beijing-Shanghai high-speed railway, which also verifies the effectiveness of the framework.

Under the strategic goal of "peak carbon dioxide emissions and carbon neutrality" in China, industries with high energy consumption and high pollution, such as iron and steel plants, are facing great pressure of energy conservation and emission reduction, and are in urgent need of green and low-carbon transformation. In this paper, 46 iron and steel plants in Hebei province are taken as examples. GIS spatial analysis and environmental emission list method are used to build a comprehensive evaluation model of rooftop photovoltaic, and to calculate the technical potential, energy saving and emission reduction benefits and economic feasibility of deploying rooftop photovoltaic in iron and steel plants. Finally, carbon trading mechanism is introduced to analyze its impact on the carbon trading market. It is found that 46 iron and steel plants save 216,700 tons of standard coal, reduce 144,700 tons of CO2 emissions and reduce 1,500 tons of SO2, NOX, PM and other air pollutants every year. The economic benefit of power generation self-use mode is greater than that of grid-fed mode, with an average return on investment of 140% and a payback period of 5.5 years. The results verify that rooftop photovoltaic in iron and steel plants has dual benefits of energy saving and emission reduction and economy, and this data can provide a feasible path for iron and steel plants to use photovoltaic for green and low-carbon transformation.

With the rapid development of railway traffic in China's alpine regions, real-time self-powered snow removal is an important route for cleaning track switch, which currently still use manual sweeping or electrical heating. These two traditional snow removal methods require large amounts of manpower or electricity. Here we propose a zero-energy snow clearing device that can continuously remove snow for switch only by track vibration. This device mainly contains a motion conversion mechanism and an air compression component. The motion conversion mechanism can amplify the micro-vibration of the rail and act as a mechanical engine (ME) that drives the air compression component to generate high-pressure air to blow off the snow at the track switch. A prototype was manufactured to demonstrate the feasibility of the design. From the high-pressure air generated by rail vibration to the process of snow removal, it is a nature cycle of no external energy consumption.

Traditional photovoltaic systems are facing two major problems, including occupying excessive land resources and causing power loss due to long-distance power transmission. In this paper, we investigate an adaptive celestial motion-based solar photovoltaics, which is installed on the cooling tower of a thermal power plant. The proposed solar photovoltaics can rotate around its own axis and revolve around the cooling tower, which enables the solar panels to be always perpendicular to the solar rays based on the rotation and revolution of the earth. In order to estimate the technical and economic performance of the solar photovoltaics, three thermal power plants located in Wujing, Datong, and Hami in China are selected for a case study. Comparative analysis is conducted under four different photovoltaic configurations of fixed angle, adjustable azimuth, adjustable tilt, and adjustable azimuth and tilt of solar panels. Analysis and estimation results show that the capacities of photovoltaic installations reach 1.76 MW, 3.51 MW, and 1.82 MW, with corresponding annual power generation of 2.13 GWh, 6.00 GWh, and 3.94 GWh in Wujing, Datong, and Hami, respectively. The total profits are 27.9 million CNY, 60.7 million CNY, and 36.0 million CNY, with the return on investment of 240%, 261%, and 300%, respectively. Based on solar radiation, local electricity price, and cooling tower area, the payback period for PVs of the three studied power plants is about 6 years. The high energy and economic benefits indicate that the proposed photovoltaics has a good prospect for being considered as an auxiliary power generation system in thermal power plant.

Electrification is taking place to reduce the emissions from maritime transportation by substituting ships’ auxiliary engine generation with shore power systems, therefore the power demand at berths increases dramatically. In this paper, we take Yangshan Port as an example to evaluates the feasibility of different photovoltaics (PV) technologies to suffice shore power demand based on geographic information system. The results show the potential shore power demand at Yangshan port is 288.8 MW, which can be sufficed by deploying PV either on available land or on water area. The further techno-economic comparison between conventional grounding PV and floating PV reveals that although the system cost of floating PV is higher than grounding PV, the higher efficiency of floating PV due to the cooling effect of water, in turn, results in a lower levelized cost of electricity (LCOE). The LCOE of all types of PV system is much lower than the retail electricity rate at Yangshan Port, which indicates that with the assistance of PV technology, high cost, the biggest hindrance of prompting shore power at Yangshan port can be overcome, and integrating PV technology at ports is a promising and practical solution to cope with electrification trend in the maritime transportation sector.

The high energy consumption of the steel industry has been a major challenge for the sustainability and environmental protection. Steel companies, the backbone of heavy industry in China take a vital position in climate change mitigation. To pursue sustainability and decrease emissions, an increasing number of steel companies tend to seek help from renewable energy. Integrating solar photovoltaics (PV) at steel plants is promising to reach the target. This paper investigates the potential capacity, potential output and economic performance of PV technology of 228 steel plants in China. The results indicate that the huge potential capacity and output are up to 6.96×106 KW and 9.71×109 kWh, respectively. Moreover, the ROI and profit under all self-consumption scenarios and all feed-into grid scenarios are evaluated, which shows integrating PV into the steel industry is also profitable. Among two scenarios, the all self-consumption scenario earns a higher ROI and profit compared with the all feed-into grid scenario.

Energy Policy; Energy Resources; Energy Systems; Energy Management © 2020 This study develops a new concept involving using the existing infrastructure for photovoltaic (PV) generation to reduce the costs associated with increased land use and to avoid curtailment due to the mismatch between power supply and demand. We establish a method to estimate the technological potential and economic performance of the PV systems deployed in coal-fired power plants in China. The potential capacity of the examined 1,082 units in China reaches 4 GWe, which is equivalent to 32% of China's newly installed distributed PV capacity in 2019. A total of 87% of PV systems achieve plant-side grid parity compared with desulfurized coal benchmark electricity prices. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that investigates the use of rooftops and coal storage sheds in power plants to facilitate low-cost, flexible PV power generation, thus opening a new channel for future PV generation development.