The Handbook of Energy provides comprehensive, organized coverage on all phases of energy and its role in society, including its social, economic, political, historical, and environmental aspects. While there is a wealth of information about energy available, it is spread across many books, journals, and websites and it tends to target either a particular form of energy or a specific audience. 

Governments across the globe are setting targets for reducing their carbon emissions. For example, the UK Government has committed to an eighty per cent reduction by 2050, when twenty-eight million buildings that currently exist will still be standing; this represents a challenge to improve the energy efficiency of more than one building per minute between now and 2050! This is a problem that needs tackling worldwide and is a challenge to both the refurbishment sector of the global construction industry and to those who own and operate existing buildings.

Business Models for Renewable Energy in the Built Environment provides insight to policy makers and market actors as to the ways that new and innovative business models (and/or policy measures) can stimulate the deployment of renewable energy technologies (RET) and energy efficiency (EE) measures in this field. This project was initiated and funded by the IEA Implementing Agreement for Renewable Energy Technology Deployment (IEA-RETD). It analyses ten business models in three categories, covering different types of energy service companies (ESCO’s).

Energy demands of cities need to be met more sustainably. This book analyses the technical and social systems that satisfy these needs and asks how methods can be put into practice to achieve this.  Drawing on analytical tools and case studies developed at Imperial College London, the book presents state-of-the-art techniques for examining urban energy systems as integrated systems of technologies, resources, and people.

The lifetime cost of wind energy is comprised of a number of components including the investment cost, operation and maintenance costs, financing costs, and annual energy production. Accurate representation of these cost streams is critical in estimating a wind plant’s cost of energy. Some of these cost streams will vary over the life of a given project.

Recent events have renewed long-standing congressional interest in safe management of spent nuclear fuel (SNF) and other high level nuclear waste. These issues have been examined and debated for decades, sometimes renewed by world events like the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The incident at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear reactor complex in Japan, combined with the termination of the Yucca Mountain geologic repository project, have contributed to the increased interest.

This Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Special Report (IPCC-SRREN) assesses the potential role of renewable energy in the mitigation of climate change.

In the near future the appearance and spatial organization of urban and rural landscapes will be strongly influenced by the generation of renewable energy. One of the critical tasks will be the re-integration of these sustainable energy landscapes into the existing environment—which people value and want to preserve—in a socially fair, environmentally sound, and economically feasible manner.

This book deals with exergy and its applications to various energy systems and applications as a potential tool for design, analysis and optimization, and its role in minimizing and/or eliminating environmental impacts and providing sustainable development. In this regard, several key topics ranging from the basics of the thermodynamic concepts to advanced exergy analysis techniques in a wide range of applications are covered as outlined in the contents.

The provision of sustainable energy supplies for an expanding and increasingly productive world is one of the major issues facing civilisation today. Renewable Energy examines both the practical and economic potential of the renewable energy sources to meet this challenge.

This path-breaking book explores the new European energy policy, highlighting the significance of environmental policy concerns, instruments, and objectives vis-à-vis competing security and market dimensions in order to achieve an all-embracing EU energy policy perspective for the future.

This book will be useful to all those working or studying in the environmental or energy arena, including law students, legal professionals, engineering and science students and professionals. By adopting a multi-disciplinary approach to environmental and energy law, the book embraces all readerships and helps to address the often thorny problem of communication between scientists, engineers, lawyers and policy-makers.