In the past decade, metal halide perovskites have attracted tremendous attention in the field of photovoltaics and light emission due to their superb optoelectronic properties and potentially low manufacturing costs. Perovskite solar cells have shown remarkable progress in recen…
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This thesis analyzes the human waste crisis in India. The lack of sanitation facilities as well as open defecation seriously impacts India's ability to achieve its sanitation goals by 2015. More importantly, if the World Health Organization is to meet its Millennium Development …
In conjunction with the continuity equation, the Cauchy equation forms the basis in formulating existing wind turbine (WT) aerodynamics theories such as the actuator disk (ADT), rotating annular stream-tube (RAST) and blade element momentum (BEMT) theories. An alternative vortex…
The impacts of climate change will exacerbate humanitarian crises at a global level, and there is an urgent need to eliminate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from the power system infrastructure. While deploying clean energy resources in the current grid will help in decarbonizat…
Photovoltaics are at the forefront of new additions of renewable energy, driven by rapid integration of new technologies most significantly a transition from traditional Al-BSF to higher efficiency PERC silicon cells. As they are a more modern technology, PERC cells do not have …
Eswatini is a country that is currently highly dependent on South Africa for the supply of electricity. Eswatini imports on average 80% of electricity from South Africa annually. Additionally, Eswatini Electricity Company only utilizes hydropower stations to provide for the elec…
This dissertation encompasses three works on nuclear power plants (NPPs). A theme common to all chapters is the question of why nuclear power has failed to achieve the success envisioned by its proponents, particularly when that success has been achieved at certain times and in …
This Praxis introduces the SAFE-T (Solar Advanced Forecast Expectation Tool) as an approach to improve local area solar energy forecasts using machine learning based techniques in MATLAB. With the increasing cost competitiveness of solar versus diesel electricity production, the…
Photovoltaic (PV) energy represents one of the most importantly clean and cheap energy sources. However, the intermittent behavior of the generated power from PV systems imposes challenges in its design and operation. Due to the internal nature of renewable energy and battery te…
Load forecasting has always been an integral part of plant operation. Energy usage is tied to economics and national prosperity. The power grid is in a perpetual state of balance, with the customers consuming the exact amount of energy the utility provides. Knowing the load fore…
Concerning the fact that the number of wind turbines is increasing worldwide, it seems necessary to implement monitoring systems. To respond to this demand, this PhD thesis studies different fault diagnosis techniques in order to improve the reliability and reduce maintenance co…
As India expanded its grid infrastructure, decentralized renewable energy technologies, such as off-grid solar, also emerged in parallel as an electrification solution. This dissertation critically examines the role of off-grid solar in facilitating rural electrification efforts…
Wholesale electricity market and retail tariff design often uses anachronistic assumptions based on existing technology characteristics or historical computational and data limitations. This dissertation conducts four categories of analysis on how electricity market design can b…
Background Maternal and newborn mortality remain a pervasive problem in Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia; annually, as many as 300,000 maternal deaths occur worldwide from complications of pregnancy and childbirth. One million newborns do not survive their first day of life. Interven…
At its core, environmental & resource economics seeks to identify and correct market failures, i.e. situations in which markets fail to allocate resources in a way that maximizes society’s economic welfare. Some of the greatest issues of our time such as water and air pollut…
Inspired by Imitation Learning, this dissertation trained a LSTM network by a mock-up operation experience of a solar energy community distribution system. Unlike the conventional method that implements LSTM only to predict features for the control programme to calculate an oper…
In this dissertation, six artificial intelligence (AI) based methods for forecasting solar irradiance are presented. Solar energy is a clean renewable energy source (RES) which is free and abundant in nature. But despite the environmental impacts of fossil energy, global depende…
The addition of a thermal energy storage (TES) into a process allows the operator to store and release thermal energy on demand. This increased process flexibility leads to potential benefits such as shifting energy demand from peak to off-peak hours. In particular, so called ph…
In the 1970s, California Governor Jerry Brown imposed new limits on California, arguing that future losses of revenue and natural resources could alter state government’s capacity to provide services. Embracing conservative ideas like reducing the size of government, limiting so…