Maximum and minimum loops

BY

Abdulkadir Hassan

Introduction

Energy is vital to life and as such access to clean energy makes life better.

Unfortunately billions of people lack access to clean energy source thereby posing several threats to quality of life especially in the Third World. According to WHO statistics over 2.4 billion people lack access to decent energy for cooking, which result in about 1.5m deaths

annually due various forms of hazards from using solid fuels (fire woods, dung, coal etc). This figure is higher than the number of deaths from TB, malaria and HIV/AIDS.

Proceeding of PTDF – UMYU International Conference on Renewable Energy Katsina 2012 3rd – 5th Sept. 2012

Introduction

Modern energy is vital in addressing these energy challenges, but despite numerous resources many people lack access. 1.6 b billion people mostly in Sub Saharan Africa (SSA) and Asia lack access to electricity eg 400m in India and 500m in SSA.

Due to this, poorest people spend about 30% of their income on inefficient sources of energy, spend about US$38b yearly on kerosene for lighting, US$10b for recharging mobile phones.

In an attempt to solve this problem, IEA

reported that about US$9.1b was spent in

2009 to increase access to energy, and it

estimated that about US$48b investment

will be required yearly between 2010 to

2030 to ensure universal access. This

Way Foreword

• Investment in diverse energy infrastructure both non- renewable and renewable sources

• Public Private Partnership

• Research and development. Private sector needs to offer support in R & D. Recently donated US$500m for renewable energy research to a University of California, Berkeley

• Incentives and the enabling environment

• Support of global community, multilateral institutions and other relevant bodies

• As a sign of increasing interest investing in Biofuels grew to US$47b in 2011. US Navy in 2010 set an ambitious target to reduce relying on foreign oil by generating 20% of its requirements from renewable, UK target to generate 15% of its electricity requirements from renewables by 2020

• Leverage on the existing arrangement by the UN, which declared 2012 as the International Year for Sustainable Energy for All

As indicated variety of solution exist, however this paper will review one of the key solutions, which has multiplier impacts in economic and environmental terms, which is addressing the energy needs via waste conversion, Biomass.

The wastes littering most of our cities can be converted into profitable use as energy source. The US generates about 590m tons of Municipal Solid Wastes (MSW), which are being used for different application, as the landfill and incineration are being faced out. 20m tons of MSW can generate about 3 giga watt of electricity.

In addition to environment, increasing population of the world and depleting reserves levels of fossils oil necessitate the need to look into other alternatives

Proceeding of PTDF – UMYU International Conference on Renewable Energy Katsina 2012 3rd – 5th Sept. 2012

Biomass

• B iomass refers to living on recently materials and are available on renewable basis

• It include agricultural wastes, plant fibre , cellulose based

materials, industrial wastes and other biodegradable parts of municipal solid waste

• Includes plants and other

materials that could be used to

produce fuel (solid, liquid or

Biofuels

• Fuels produced from biomass

• Solid, liquid or gaseous

• Used for domestic applications, electricity generation, industrial and transportation etc

• Examples include Biodiesel, biogas, ethanol etc

Biofuel

Proceeding of PTDF – UMYU International Conference on Renewable Energy Katsina 2012 3rd – 5th Sept. 2012

Biofuels

• Biomass based materials have been used as source of clean energy 1896 but has not received significant attention until 1970s.

• In 1900 at World Exhibition in Paris, Rudolph demonstrated an engine which worked on peanut oil. The engine was named after him

• In 1904 the fastest running car which had up to 167KMPH speed ran on biofuel.

• Also during the World War II vegetable oils used to produced diesel

• The rise in oil price in 1970s due to Arab-Israeli war led to significant rise in petroleum price, this led to renewed interest in biofuels as alternative.

• Ever since then biofuels are produced from variety of sources including food

Global Clean Energy Generation

As at 2011

Source Gigawatt

Wind 239

Small Hydro 184

Solar 73

Biomass 57

Geothermal 11

Marine 0.6

Total 565

Proceeding of PTDF – UMYU International Conference on Renewable Energy Katsina 2012 3rd – 5th Sept. 2012

Biofuels from Food Crops

• Biofuels from food crops are generated from such sources as sugar, cassava, grains etc. They are also referred to as first generation biofuels

• However, due to level of hunger and rising prices of food couple with affordability issues stakeholders especially Food & Agricultural Organisation, World Food Programme, civil organisations and other concerned parties have continue express concern over the use of food crops for fuel production.

• As reported recently by BBC over 9m people along Sahel belt (mainly Niger Republic) are affected by hunger and the figure is likely to grow to 15m.

• While globally about 1 billion people are affected by extreme as mid of 2012. This poses challenge to MDGs target of reducing level of extreme hunger by 50%in the 2015.

• The Biofuel industry has been blame for this. The industry pays higher

In document Python for Everybody: Exploring Data Using Python 3 (Page 74-80)