Brief overview of the Topic

The topic of the project, Transmission of Renewable Energy involved the study of available renewable sources and various transmission strategies. Renewable energy which is plentiful in certain areas could possibly be too scarce to exploit in other places. Due to the site dependency of these energy sources, studies had to be done

Since energy from renewable sources could be converted into different usable forms like gas, electricity and hydrogen, investigations into the conversion efficiencies and feasibility of implementation were carried out. Transmission strategies, were also studied because in the case of transmitting electrical energy for instance, there were many problems/challenges associated with the different levels considered in the UK for National, Regional and Site specific.

Having studied the renew- able energy sources, the various forms of useful energy and the different transmission levels, the group had decided to focus

on the transmission of renewable energy at the local level, specifically to be used within the built environment. We felt that the group’s interest in this particular area would clear the path to develop a meaningful contribution as the project deliverable.

The specific challenge which the group undertook was to develop a means of quantifying the amount of renewable energy which could be exploited in attempt to match the demand of buildings or a group of buildings. This exercise was conducted through a decision support tool (DST) designed by the group called Renewable Energy Integrated Simulator REIS . Knowing some basic information about the potential site for implementing this program, the user would be able to know if and how much the usage of Renewable Energy could effect his/her current demand profile. The output from REIS would be in the form of graphs of supply and demand for daily, monthly or yearly time frames of half hourly data.

A group of buildings within the University of Strathclyde campus was used as a case study to test the robustness of the DST. The results from this study clearly indicated that the contribution from the renewable energy sources was not enough to satisfy the demand profile for that group of buildings. However, even though the demand was not completely matched, the DST proved to successfully use the available data to provide the user with valuable information. On the whole, the DST is a rules-based system which could be used to obtain fairly accurate preliminary information to be used with more specific programs or as a planning tool for future development in the field of transmission of renewable energy within the build environment.