Electricity demand response refers to consumer actions that change the utility load profile in a way that reduces costs or improves grid security. The focus of demand response has mainly been on the commercial and big industrial sectors because of the large demand reduction that they can offer to the utility grid operators. Utilities are showing increasing interest in residential demand response (RDR). RDR can be treated as an energy resource which can be assessed and commercially developed, however, there are still some issues that remain to be addressed for RDR to be successful. These include price unresponsiveness of some residential consumers, equity issues and high cost of the metering infrastructure. The aim of this paper is to investigate and present some of the challenges in achieving effective voluntary demand reduction based on a review of residential demand response literature as well as the general residential energy use behaviour literature. The authors propose the use of a hybrid engineering approach using social psychology and economic 2 behaviour models to overcome these challenges and realize the benefits of supply security and cost management.
In this article, thin solid films are processed via pulsed-pressure metal organic chemical vapour deposition (PP-MOCVD) on FTO substrates over a range of processing times to produce a range of thicknesses and microstructures. The films are highly nanostructured anatase-rutile TiO2 composite films with unique single crystal dendrites. After annealing, carbon was removed, and materials showed improved water splitting activity; with IPCEs above 80 % in the UV, photocurrents of ~1.2 mA.cm-2 at 1.23 VRHE at 1 sun irradiance and an extension of photoactivity into the visible range. The annealed material exhibits minimal recombination losses and IPCEs amongst the highest reported in the literature; attributed to the formation of a high surface area nanostructured material and synergetic interactions between the anatase and rutile phases.
TiO2 photocatalyst is of interest for antimicrobial coatings on hospital touch-surfaces. Recent research has focused on visible spectrum enhancement of photocatalytic activity. Here, we report TiO2 with a high degree of nanostructure, deposited on stainless steel as a solid layer more than 10 μm thick by pulsed-pressure-MOCVD. The TiO2 coating exhibits a rarely-reported microstructure comprising anatase and rutile in a composite with amorphous carbon. Columnar anatase single crystals are segmented into 15–20 nm thick plates, resulting in a mille-feuilles nanostructure. Polycrystalline rutile columns exhibit dendrite generation resembling pine tree strobili. We propose that high growth rate and co-deposition of carbon contribute to formation of the unique nanostructures. High vapor flux produces step-edge instabilities in the TiO2, and solid carbon preferentially co-deposits on certain high energy facets. The equivalent effective surface area of the nanostructured coating is estimated to be 100 times higher than standard TiO2 coatings and powders. The coatings prepared on stainless steel showed greater than 3-log reduction in viable E coli after 4 hours visible light exposure. The pp-MOCVD approach could represent an up-scalable manufacturing route for supported catalysts of functional nanostructured materials without having to make nanoparticles.
There is growing concern about the risks to urban transportation with the advent of the peak in world oil production. Travel requires fuel energy, but current transportation planning does not deal with issues, policies or engineering designs for fuel constrained situations.This research presents a method to assess the risk to activities due to future fuel shortages as a function of urban form. The method uses probability of fuel short fall and impact due to loss of trips, including the new metric of essential, necessary and optional trips in the travel demand patterns. A case study explored four future growth options from the urban development strategy of Christchurch, New Zealand. Various oil shortage scenarios are developed and imposed on each 2041 urban form. All urban forms would lose and/or change trips according to essentiality and available options, but the risk to activities would be very different for different future cities. The high urban density case would have the lowest risks to participation in activities, while sprawled urban forms would have the highest risks in all simulated scenarios. This risk assessment method is being considered for identifying unacceptable growth patterns and mitigation measure as part of the local long range planning efforts in Christchurch.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.