Cleaner Engineering and Technology (Aug 2023)
Renewable energy for SDG-7 and sustainable electrical production, integration, industrial application, and globalization: Review
Abstract
Traditional electricity is produced from coal, mineral oil, or fossil fuels those have produced a heavy environmental pollution by the greenhouse gas emissions and industrial pollutants. The UN SDG-7 target is to make everyone access to affordable, reliable, clean, renewable and sustainable energy. The renewable energy is the key to the sustainable green energy for the human daily living and natural environment with non-pollutant gas emissions to diminish climate change. Here, this article briefly reviews current results and techniques in converting the renewable energy into electrical energy for sustainable electrical production, integration, industrial application, and green energy globalization. New technologies and integration methods of the sustainable electricity into power grids such as developing hybrid systems, micro-grids, smart-grids, optimal algorithm methods and systems have been applied to increase development and applications of electricity. The emerging triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs) produce the electrical energy from converting all kinds of mechanical energy for the self-powered devices, low-power portable electrical consumption devices, and SDG-7 target. A globalization strategy of using renewable energy is important to replace the traditional electrical energy with renewable energy for green and sustainable development goal. The renewable energy features many advantages such as conserving fossil fuel, non-gas emissions, low-cost energy resources, and ensuring the energy security. The renewable energy also shows some disadvantages such as high capital cost, low efficiency, depending on weather conditions (daily, night time, monthly, season, and period of time), and environment problems. Many solutions have been developed to solve limitation issues such as using storage technology to store energy for long time use, developing storage system to balance the output performance of the energy conversion plants, and optimizing the energy plant location to reduce cost and environmental impacts.
