Page - 93 - in Clean Water Using Solar and Wind - Outside the Power Grid

Part III Renewable Energy Technologies Renewable energy is revolutionising energy availability. Climate change motivates the search for energy sources that do not generate a carbon footprint. It must be recognised that traditional energy sources require water for primary fuel extraction, refining, transportation and electricity generation. Solar PV and wind energy can decouple the dependency between water and energy with much smaller carbon and water footprints. The other crucial property is the scalability of solar PV and wind, from stand-alone household production to villages and regions. However, the sun does not shine all the time and the wind is sometimes too calm. Therefore, the intermittent generation of energy from solar and wind has to be managed. Stored energy must be available when the primary sources are not available. Solar PV is the topic of Chapter 8 and wind energy is briefly discussed in Chapter 9. Various ways to handle the intermittent nature of these energy sources are described in Chapter 10. Some issues of energy management are discussed in Chapter 11. The coordination of different production units and different loads is critical. The use of energy storage capacity makes it necessary to carefully plan the energy flow in the stand-alone system. Downloaded from https://iwaponline.com/ebooks/book-pdf/520710/wio9781780409443.pdf by IWA Publishing user