Introduction: Clean Energy Conversion Technologies

Abstract

Abstract The power plants that have provided energy in the last century are facing a difficult future as renewable energy sources are taking a higher and higher share of the power generation. This is more evident in some areas of Europe, but the trend is towards a significant increase of renewable energy in the near future. Conventional power plants, such as vapor cycles, gas turbines and internal combustion engines, which have powered our lives in the last 150 years, are now required new performance and environmental goals: high efficiency, flexibility and low or zero emissions. The research and development in the last 60 years have provided several solutions to improve the performance of those power plants. There are clear directions to follow to achieve low or zero emissions, but knowledge is not enough to reach the goals. Therefore, there is still a great need to find new and innovative solutions that will be a breakthrough towards the clean energy systems of the future. This volume presents a number of energy conversion processes and systems which are currently being used in very large numbers, their development to the current state of art, the efforts that are still necessary to make this systems really “clean”, in order to stimulate the readers, either researchers or students, in using their brain to improve them in order to have “clean”, available and reliable systems for power generation.

Keywords

Identifiers

DOI

10.1002/9781118991978.hces009

Journal

Handbook of Clean Energy Systems

Year

2015