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Renewable energy in Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, particular solar energy, can be connected to Europe to provide the Northern neighbouring countries with electricity. To achieve this long term objective, it is necessary to understand the local domestic consumption of electricity in the MENA region as the main consumer of energy. The understanding of current and future trends could help to provide a complete picture of the energy situation in MENA region and the feasibility of exporting energy to Europe. For this reason, this paper investigates the domestic energy use and occupants’ energy behaviour in Libya. The aim of this study is to evaluate the effect of domestic energy consumption and householders’ awareness, attitudes and behaviour on the overall energy consumption in Libya and how this could affect the peak demand, capacity, future trends and government energy budget. The paper also investigates the sustainability aspect of consumer products and the awareness and attitude of consumers towards consumption and demand. A comprehensive survey has been conducted to evaluate several aspects of domestic energy demand and characteristics in Libya. The findings have indicated that there is a significant increase in energy demands in the household sector in Libya and it is significant to have a clear strategy to reduce carbon emission and energy use by improving occupants’ behaviour as well as utilising other sustainable measures. Minor adjustment in householders’ energy consumption behaviour and the technology used to generate energy could provide significant financial savings and contribute significantly to the reduction in carbon emission and energy consumption. This will allow significant benefit to the local economy and the energy sector in Libya but at the same time could provide sustainable energy resources for Europe on the long term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the energy and economic performance of roof and/or façades Building Integrated flat-plate PhotoVoltaic and Thermal (BIPVT) collectors for residential applications. Aim of the analysis is to assess the active and passive effects due to the building integration of solar technologies on the building energy consumptions. In particular, a comparison among innovative building-plant system configurations, based on BIPVT collectors for the simultaneous production of electricity, thermal energy, and domestic hot water, is carried out. The simulation models of the proposed system layouts are designed and implemented in TRNSYS simulation environment for the dynamic assessment of their energy and economic performance. By means of the developed simulation model, the occurring summer and winter building passive energy effects due to the PVT building integration are also analysed. Several case studies are developed by modelling a representative multi-storey residential building and by taking into account different European climates. For such case studies a suitable energy parametric analysis is performed by varying the thermal resistances and capacitances of the building envelope. By the simulation results interesting design and economic feasibility guidelines are obtained. In particular, by varying the weather location and the building-plant configuration, the adoption of BIPVT panels produces a decrease of the primary energy demands from 67% to 89%. The passive effects of the BIPVT system in both the winter and summer season are also assessed for all the investigated climate zones. The calculated economic profitability resulted slightly better for roof BIPVT panels than for roof and façade applications. For the investigated case studies, the pay back periods appear quite long, varying from 11 years for South European weather zones to 20 for North European ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The number of large-scale solar thermal installations has increased rapidly in Europe in recent years, with 70 % of these systems operating with flat-plate solar collectors. Since these systems cannot be easily switched on and off but directly depend on the solar radiation, they have to be combined with other technologies or integrated in large energy systems. In order to most efficiently integrate and operate solar systems, it is of great importance to consider their expected energy yield to better schedule heat production, storage and distribution. To do so the availability of accurate forecasting methods for the future solar energy yield are essential. Currently available forecasting methods do not meet three important practical requirements: simple implementation, automatic adaption to seasonal changes and wide applicability. For these reasons, a simple and adaptive forecasting method is presented in this paper, which allows to accurately forecast the solar heat production of flat-plate collector systems considering weather forecasts. The method is based on a modified collector efficiency model where the parameters are continuously redetermined to specifically consider the influence of the time of the day. In order to show the wide applicability the method is extensively tested with measurement data of various flat-plate collector systems covering different applications (below 200 ° Celsius), sizes and orientations. The results show that the method can forecast the solar yield very accurately with a Mean Absolute Range Normalized Error (MARNE) of about 5 % using real weather forecasts as inputs and outperforms common forecasting methods by being nearly twice as accurate. • Self-learning approach with only very few parameters to be determined. • Automatically considers seasonal changes and pollution of collector fields. • Simple regarding its mathematical structure and straightforward to implement. • Experimental long-term validation with data from various collector systems. • Superior to state-of-the-art forecasting methods regarding accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• First power system study considering regional differences in cost of capital. • System design is significantly affected compared to homogeneous reference. • Levelized costs of wind power decrease. • Levelized costs of solar photovoltaic increase. • Levelized costs of electricity are unevenly distributed across Europe. In order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions of the power sector, high shares of renewable power sources need to be integrated into existing systems. This will require vast amounts of investments. Cost of the capital needed for these investments are unevenly distributed among European regions. They show a clear North-South and West-East divide, which has not exhibited significant signs of narrowing in recent years. Power system studies investigating a continent-wide European power system, however, usually assume homogeneous cost of capital. The objective of this paper is to investigate how regional differences in cost of capital affect the result of these studies with respect to the optimal power system design. Our analysis is based on power system optimization with inhomogeneous cost of capital in Europe. We find that assuming homogeneous cost of capital leads to estimates on the levelized costs of electricity in a highly renewable European power system, which are too conservative. The optimal system design is significantly affected compared to an inhomogeneous scenario. In particular, we show that inhomogeneous cost of capital favors overall wind power deployment in the case of Europe, while the investment in solar power decreases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]