Gas crunch will prolong the energy crisis into 2022

Significance Particularly in Europe, where gas-fired generation sets the marginal power price, high gas prices are being passed directly through into higher electricity prices. Impacts Low-income households will be particularly hard hit by increased gas and power prices, despite government efforts to protect consumers. Reduced industrial activity will hamper the process of supply chain restocking and pass price pressures through to manufactured goods. High liquefied natural gas (LNG) prices will support new investment in LNG capacity, but also restrain coal-to-gas switching in Asia.

Practical Operation Strategies for Energy Storage System under Uncertainty

Recent advances in battery technologies have reduced the financial burden of using the energy storage system (ESS) for customers. Peak cut, one of the benefits of using ESS, can be achieved through proper charging/discharging scheduling of ESS. However, peak cut is sensitive to load-forecasting error, and even a small forecasting error may result in the failure of peak cut. In this paper, we propose a two-phase approach of day-ahead optimization and real-time control for minimizing the total cost that comes from time-of-use (TOU), peak load, and battery degradation. In day-ahead optimization, we propose to use an internalized pricing to manage peak load in addition to the cost from TOU. The proposed method can be implemented by using dynamic programming, which also has an advantage of accommodating the state-dependent battery degradation cost. Then in real-time control, we propose a concept of marginal power to alleviate the performance loss incurred from load-forecasting error and mimic the offline optimal battery scheduling by learning from load-forecasting error. By exploiting the marginal power, real-time ESS charging/discharging power gets close to the offline optimal battery scheduling. Case studies show that under load-forecasting uncertainty, the peak power using the proposed method is only 22.4% higher than the offline optimal peak power, while the day-ahead optimization has 76.8% higher peak power than the offline optimal power. In terms of profit, the proposed method achieves 77.0% of the offline optimal profit while the day-ahead method only earns 19.6% of the offline optimal profit, which shows the substantial improvement of the proposed method.

Salafi Formations in Palestine and the Limits of a De-Palestinised Milieu

A Palestinian version of the contemporary Salafi interpretation of Islam, intimately linked to Saudi Wahhabism, appeared in the Gaza Strip in the early 1970s. Deliberately distancing themselves from Palestinian politics, and from the struggle with Israel, the Palestinian Salafis in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip or inside Israel, remained a marginal power. Yet by the late 1990s and since the early 2000s they have become more visible and part of their formation has started to show signs of militancy. Currently, they are divided between a mainstream apolitical branch and more militant ‘Jihadi Salafi’ bents echoing the global rise of Al-Qaeda. This article attempts to chart the Palestinian Salafi terrain and their changing fortunes in the light of their perception of ‘Palestine and the Palestinian identity’.

Sensitivity Analysis of the Life-Cycle Inventories of Electricity and Hydrogen as Energy Vectors for the Philippine Automative Transport Sector

The Philippine automotive transport sector accounts for a significant portion ofthe country's petroleum consumption and air emissions. Research in alternative fuels for road vehicles is thus an essential element in the country's long-term-electrical environmental management strategy. Two radical vehicle technologies propulsion systems and fuel hydrogen for fuel cells - are widely considered to be the most promising energy vectors from an environmental standpoint. Electric vehicles (EV) and fuel cell vehicles (FCV) are driven by electric motors; the former use electricity stored in batteries, while the latter generate electricity from the oxidation of hydrogen. Potentially, both electric power and fuel hydrogen can be sustainably produced using renewable energy sources, and their use in vehicles generates almost no direct pollution. However, life-cycle assessment (LCA) may reveal significant environmental impacts from the infrastructure required to produce and distribute these energy vectors on a commercial scale. This study quantifies the life-cycle air emissions and energy balances associated with the use of electricity and hydrogen for motor vehicle propulsion in order to determine which fuel offers more environmental benefits. The assessment uses a modified version of the GREET 1.Sa fuel cycle inventory model, with corrections made to account for Philippine conditions. Sensitivity analysis is performed in the model to determine the effect of marginal power generation mix and system transmission losses on the life-cycle inventories of both energy vectors. The results of the simulation indicate that for a given marginal power generation mix, there is no clear-cut advantage in terms of environmental performance for either hydrogen or electricity.