Sustainable Energy and Mobility Publications

Sustainable Mobility: Renewable Energies for Powering Fuel Cell Vehicles

A wide-ranging, forthright exmamination of why fuels from renewable resources are an ever more attractive source of power, at a time when the environment is suffering from pollution by fossil fuels that can only get worse. With energy consumption rising and with it our dependence on crude oil from politically uncertain regions, and faced with the threat to the environment from polluting emissions, it is becoming ever more evident that fuels from renewable resources are an increasingly attractive option to fossil fuels.

Edinger and Kaul, like a growing number of other experts, hold the mobility of populations--transportation, in other words, responsible for the rise in the rate of greenhouse gas emissions, a condition that can only get worse as less developed regions of the world emerge with their own needs and demands for mobility. What to do?

Edinger and Kaul outline in sharp detail the shortcomings of current vehicular technologies and dominant fossil fuels. They present a careful, authoritative examination of innovative technologies that in their opinion have the best chance of combating dangerous reliance on conventional means of power, not only for transportation but other purposes as well.

And they focus on special forms of fuel cell drive systems, with their high efficiencies and reduced consumptions, and on other emerging renewable technologies and their innovative, sustainable power sources, such as fuels from biomass and renewable electricity, a particularly promising source of energy for newly growing economies.

Wide ranging in coverage, forthright in style, the book is an important review of how things are today, why they could get worse, but perhaps most importantly, what we can do about it.

Raphael Edinger and Sanjay Kaul; Sustainable Mobility: Renewable Resources for Powering Fuel Cell Vehicles. Praeger Books, Greenwood Publishing Group, Westport, CT, USA (2003), 144pp.

Renewable Resources for Electric Power: Prospects and Challenges

The Brundtland Report in 1987 adjoined sustainable development to the political agenda. The subsequent United Nations‘ conferences on climate change have identified measures to address the challenge of global warming.

Shifting our energy systems from its predominantly fossil fuel basis toward renewable resources for electricity production appears a viable approach to reduce pollution and resource depletion. Technological advancements are continuously bringing down electric power production cost from renewable resources, facilitating market entry for an augmenting portfolio of decentralized power technologies and creating business opportunities for new power producers.

In their book, Renewable Resources for Electric Power: Prospects and Challenges, Edinger and Kaul assess the role of photovoltaics, wind power, microhydro, and hydrogen fuel cells in a liberalized market environment and enlighten historical and technological development as well as economic aspects of introducing these concepts to the electricity system. Examples on distributed power generation and the effects of economies of scale as well as the assets of modular systems are outlined and advocated for preparing the pathway toward a sustainable electric power system.

Renewable resources imply both business opportunities for new market players as well as future-oriented energy strategies for national governments concerned with long-term energy security, climate benign economic development, and socially acceptable technologies.

Raphael Edinger and Sanjay Kaul; Renewable Resources for Electric Power: Prospects and Challenges. Quorum Books, Westport, CT, USA (2000), 168pp.

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