Ireland’s Transition towards a Low Carbon Society: The Leadership Role of Higher Education Institutions in Solar Photovoltaic Niche Development

Abstract

Ireland is currently considered a laggard within Europe in relation to decarbonisation of its society, with future projections estimating increases in greenhouse gas emissions up to and beyond 2030. To accelerate Ireland’s transition towards a low-carbon society, there is a need for leadership in deployment and experimentation of low carbon technologies. As Higher Education Institutions (HEI) currently play a major role in generation of human capital and the associated impact on societal development, HEIs are ideal locations to focus resources in terms of deployment and experimentation of decarbonisation technologies to demonstrate best practice for further replication within wider society. To guide Irish HEIs in this regard, a novel integrated approach titled ‘Higher Education Accelerating Development for Sustainability’ (HEADS) has been developed and applied to the sector. The HEADS approach utilises the perspectives of quantitative systems analysis, sociotechnical analysis, and living lab learning to inform HEIs of their potential roles within national sustainability transitions. Applied to solar photovoltaic transitions in Ireland, the HEADS approach has identified HEIs as vital locations to deploy low-carbon technologies due to their amplification effect in signalling to wider society the attractiveness of these technologies.

Low Carbon Education: A Review and Bibliometric Analysis

“…The development of low carbon education is very important and must be done. Awareness of low carbon behavior must be introduced since 6 or 7 years old, in which in Indonesia is the ideal age of starting elementary school (Phang, Wong, Ho, Musa, Fujino, & Suda, 2016) and higher education (Dai, Cheng, Liu, Tang, Zheng, & Wang, 2019;Horan, Shawe, & O'Regan, 2019) so that their environment is free of carbon emissions. Actually, most students learn about the environment at school since the school (Amin, Permanasari, & Setiabudi, 2019) is responsible to provide good learning environment (leading to promoting good behavior and good characters) as well as good environmental literacy (Agboola, & Tsai, 2012).…”

“…It also can use materials about saving water and saving electricity (Fatin Aliah Phang et al, 2016). Growing the concept of environmental education in schools can introduce the low carbon concept and foster social awareness related to the low carbon concept (Horan et al, 2019). Low carbon education is a concept that has been carried out by several developing countries.…”

Probabilistic Generation Model of Solar Irradiance for Grid Connected Photovoltaic Systems Using Weibull Distribution

“…Further expansion is possible if governments and policy makers announce more incentives on the purchase of solar panels [5] and related auxiliaries such as power electronic converters and energy storages, etc., for their effective utilization [6]. Higher Education Institutes (HEIs) can also play a significant role in this regard by motivating large segments of society towards decarbonization objectives [7]. Another strategy to engage consumers in green energy programs is to declare a penalty cost for CO 2 emissions and a continuous increment in its value with the passage of time to achieve goals targeted in various environmental protocols signed by the international stakeholders [8].…”

Meteorological Variables’ Influence on Electric Power Generation for Photovoltaic Systems Located at Different Geographical Zones in Mexico

“…Higher Education Institutions (HEI) currently play a major role in the generation of human capital and the associated impact on societal development; HEIs are ideal locations to focus the resources in terms of the deployment and experimentation of decarbonization technologies to demonstrate the best practice for a further replication within wider society [30].…”

“…According to the above and considering References [1,13,30], the aim of this work is to present a statistical analysis based on the gradient descent method that is easy to implement and has a low computational load to estimate the electric power generation from the meteorological data such as the solar radiation, outdoor temperature, wind speed, and daylight time collected from PV systems located in Mexico City and Sonora [33]. This is important because most of the current photovoltaic system deployments do not monitor these factors or employ them in adaptation and prediction tasks [34][35][36].…”