Search Results (531)

This report evaluates the role of Hybrid Renewable Energy Systems (HRESs) in supporting South Africa’s energy transition amidst persistent power shortages, coal dependency, and growing decarbonisation imperatives. Drawing on national policy frameworks including the Integrated Resource Plan (IRP 2019), the Just Energy Transition (JET) strategy, and Net Zero 2050 targets, this study analyses five major HRES configurations: PV–Battery, PV–Diesel–Battery, PV–Wind–Battery, PV–Hydrogen, and Multi-Source EMS. Through technical modelling, lifecycle cost estimation, and trade-off analysis, the report demonstrates how hybrid systems can decentralise energy supply, improve grid resilience, and align with socio-economic development goals. Geographic application, cost-performance metrics, and policy alignment are assessed to inform region-specific deployment strategies. Despite enabling technologies and proven field performance, the scale-up of HRESs is constrained by financial, regulatory, and institutional barriers. The report concludes with targeted policy recommendations to support inclusive and regionally adaptive HRES investment in South Africa. Full article

Architectural education has increasingly engaged with the Circular Economy (CE); however, integration remains largely material-centric, emphasising life-cycle accounting, efficiency, and design for disassembly, while social, cultural, and governance dimensions are underrepresented. This study introduces the Circular Commons Framework, which repositions circularity as a collective, participatory, and socio-spatial practice. Using a qualitative comparative case study methodology, five international cases were analysed through eight dimensions spanning technical CE strategies and pedagogical approaches. Cross-case synthesis reveals convergent patterns around multi-scalar systems thinking, transdisciplinary collaboration, and stakeholder engagement. Nonetheless, persistent gaps emerged across cases, including those related to elective-based delivery, weak assessment infrastructure, and underdeveloped social equity dimensions. The Circular Commons Framework comprises four empirically grounded components: Circular Design Practices, Local Knowledge and Cultural Practices, Collaborative Governance, and Circular Synergy Workshops. Operationalisation guidance addresses curricular design, pedagogical methods, assessment mechanisms, and institutional enablers. Mainstreaming the framework requires systemic institutional support, including accreditation reform, supportive policy environments, and effective resource allocation, which are currently constraining even well-designed pedagogical initiatives. The framework positions architects as equity-minded stewards facilitating socially just and culturally resonant circular transitions. Limitations, including scalability tensions, indicate that the framework requires validation through longitudinal research and deeper engagement with non-Western knowledge systems. Full article

The energy sector holds critical importance for South Africa, particularly as a developing country grappling with persistent economic challenges and energy insecurity. These pressures have stimulated growing scientific and policy interest in renewable energy as a pathway to sustainable development. This study examines public perceptions and awareness of renewable energy technologies and estimates willingness to pay (WTP) for their increased integration into South Africa’s energy mix. By linking these objectives, the study provides insights into the social and economic factors that shape a just energy transition and informs targeted policies, investments, and engagement strategies to accelerate the adoption of renewable energy. A descriptive research design was employed, incorporating a systematic random sampling approach to ensure reliability and representativeness. Data were collected through structured questionnaire surveys conducted in both urban and rural households across Limpopo Province, South Africa. Findings reveal a generally positive public attitude toward the expansion of renewable energy, although knowledge levels remain moderate and are most pronounced with respect to solar energy systems. The mean household WTP for increased renewable energy penetration was estimated at ZAR 163.4 per annum. Binary logistic regression analysis identified eight statistically significant predictors of WTP: Education, Occupation, Income, Recognised Advantages (A1), Financial Incentive Schemes for RES (A3), Expansion Strategies for Renewable Energy (A4), Price Parity with Fossil Fuels (A7), and Interest-Free Financing Options (A8). These results highlight the importance of affordability, policy support, and tangible benefits in driving public acceptance. Overall, the findings highlight the potential for targeted policy and educational interventions to foster household participation and advance South Africa’s just energy transition. Full article

As ESG sustainability uncertainty intensifies and globalisation deepens, the energy trilemma—security, equity, and sustainability—emerges as the defining calculus of modern energy policy. Therefore, this investigation explores the influence of ESG sustainability uncertainty intensification and globalisation on the energy trilemma, while controlling education, urbanization and economic growth, using data from 2001 to 2022. The energy trilemma offers an all-inclusive gauge for understanding the effect of ESG sustainability uncertainty on energy trilemma. The study employed Lewbel’s Two Stage Least Squares method to examine the connection. The results disclose that ESG sustainability uncertainty is negatively associated with all three trilemma pillars. Globalisation displays a nonlinear influence: its squared terms are negative and statistically significant, implying diminishing marginal benefits at high levels of openness. This paper’s significance lies in evidence that ESG sustainability uncertainty erodes all three pillars of the energy trilemma, while globalization’s benefits taper at high openness—strengthening the mandate for a clean, just, secure, and sustainable transition. Full article

Modern energy systems are undergoing a profound transformation characterized by the active replacement of conventional fossil-fuel-based power plants with renewable energy sources. This transition aims to reduce the carbon emissions associated with electricity generation while enhancing the economic performance of electric power market players. However, alongside these benefits come several challenges, including reduced overall inertia within energy systems, heightened stochastic variability in grid operation regimes, and stricter demands on the rapid response capabilities and adaptability of emergency controls. This paper presents a novel methodology for selecting effective control laws for low-inertia energy systems, ensuring their dynamic stability during post-emergency operational conditions. The proposed approach integrates advanced techniques, including feature selection via decision tree algorithms, classification using Random Forest models, and result visualization through the Mean Shift clustering method applied to a two-dimensional representation derived from the t-distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding technique. A modified version of the IEEE39 benchmark model served as the testbed for numerical experiments, achieving a classification accuracy of 98.3%, accompanied by a control law synthesis delay of just 0.047 milliseconds. In conclusion, this work summarizes the key findings and outlines potential enhancements to refine the presented methodology further. Full article

Particle accelerators are powerful tools in fundamental research, medicine, and industry that provide high-energy beams that can be used to study matter and to enable advanced applications. The state-of-the-art particle accelerators are fundamentally constructed from superconducting radio-frequency (SRF) cavities, which act as resonant structures for the acceleration of charged particles. The performance of such cavities is governed by inherent superconducting material properties such as the transition temperature, critical fields, penetration depth, and other related parameters and material quality. For the last few decades, bulk niobium has been the preferred material for SRF cavities, enabling accelerating gradients on the order of ~50 MV/m; however, its intrinsic limitations, high cost, and complicated manufacturing have motivated the search for alternative strategies. Among these, sputter-deposited superconducting thin films offer a promising route to address these challenges by reducing costs, improving thermal stability, and providing access to numerous high-T_c superconductors. This review focuses on progress in sputtered superconducting materials for SRF applications, in particular Nb, NbN, NbTiN, Nb₃Sn, Nb₃Al, V₃Si, Mo–Re, and MgB₂. We review how deposition process parameters such as deposition pressure, substrate temperature, substrate bias, duty cycle, and reactive gas flow influence film microstructure, stoichiometry, and superconducting properties, and link these to RF performance. High-energy deposition techniques, such as HiPIMS, have enabled the deposition of dense Nb and nitride films with high transition temperatures and low surface resistance. In contrast, sputtering of Nb₃Sn offers tunable stoichiometry when compared to vapour diffusion. Relatively new material systems, such as Nb₃Al, V₃Si, Mo-Re, and MgB₂, are just a few of the possibilities offered, but challenges with impurity control, interface engineering, and cavity-scale uniformity will remain. We believe that future progress will depend upon energetic sputtering, multilayer architectures, and systematic demonstrations at the cavity scale. Full article

Water electrolysis represents a viable and scalable green hydrogen production technology, which mitigates carbon emissions and contributes to environmental sustainability. Transition metal-based layered double hydroxides (LDHs) exhibit excellent oxygen evolution reaction (OER) efficiency, attributed to their adjustable interlayer spacing combined with abundant active sites. Here, we report a uniform multimetallic catalyst, demonstrating robust and efficient OER performance for high-performance water splitting. SEM and TEM confirmed its ultrathin hierarchical nanosheet structure. The characteristic peaks of LDH in XRD and Raman spectra further verified the successful synthesis of the LDH material. Fe-CoZn LDH delivers exceptional OER performance in 1 M KOH, requiring overpotentials of just 209, 238, and 267 mV to reach 10, 100, and 400 mA cm⁻², respectively. The catalyst also demonstrates exceptional hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) performance, achieving 10 mA cm⁻² at 119 mV. It also has excellent stability, with stable operation for up to 100 h under 100 mA cm⁻² in 1 M KOH electrolyte solution. Full article

As artificial intelligence transitions from conversational agents to autonomous actors in high-stakes environments, a critical gap emerges: how to ensure AI prioritizes human safety when its core objectives conflict with human well-being. Current safety benchmarks focus on harmful content, not behavioral alignment during instrumental goal conflicts. To address this, we introduce PacifAIst, a benchmark of 700 scenarios testing self-preservation, resource acquisition, and deception. We evaluated eight state-of-the-art large language models, revealing a significant performance hierarchy. Google’s Gemini 2.5 Flash demonstrated the strongest human-centric alignment (90.31%), while the highly anticipated GPT-5 scored lowest (79.49%), indicating potential risks. These findings establish an urgent need to shift the focus of AI safety evaluation from what models say to what they would do, ensuring that autonomous systems are not just helpful in theory but are provably safe in practice. Full article

This study presents a comprehensive assessment of the energy systems in eight Eastern European countries—Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia—focusing on their energy transition, security of supply, decarbonisation, and energy efficiency. Using principal component analysis (PCA) and clustering techniques, we identify three different energy profiles: countries dependent on fossil fuels (e.g., Poland, Bulgaria), countries with a balanced mix of nuclear and fossil fuels (e.g., the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary), and countries focusing mainly on renewables (e.g., Slovenia, Croatia). The sectoral analysis shows that industry and transport are the main drivers of energy consumption and CO₂ emissions, and the challenges and policy priorities of decarbonisation are determined. Regression modelling shows that dependence on fossil fuels strongly influences the use of renewable energy and electricity consumption patterns, while national differences in per capita electricity consumption are influenced by socio-economic and political factors that go beyond the energy structure. The Decarbonisation Level Index (DLI) indicator shows that Bulgaria and the Czech Republic achieve a high degree of self-sufficiency in domestic energy, while Hungary and Slovakia are the most dependent on imports. A typology based on energy intensity and import dependency categorises Romania as resilient, several countries as balanced, and Hungary, Slovakia, and Croatia as vulnerable. The projected investments up to 2030 indicate an annual increase in clean energy production of around 123–138 TWh through the expansion of nuclear energy, the development of renewable energy, the phasing out of coal, and the improvement of energy efficiency, which could reduce CO₂ emissions across the region by around 119–143 million tons per year. The policy recommendations emphasise the accelerated phase-out of coal, supported by just transition measures, the use of nuclear energy as a stable backbone, the expansion of renewables and energy storage, and a focus on the electrification of transport and industry. The study emphasises the significant influence of European Union (EU) policies—such as the “Clean Energy for All Europeans” and “Fit for 55” packages—on the design of national strategies through regulatory frameworks, financing, and market mechanisms. This analysis provides important insights into the heterogeneity of Eastern European energy systems and supports the design of customised, coordinated policy measures to achieve a sustainable, secure, and climate-resilient energy transition in the region. Full article

The increasing share of renewable energy sources in power grids demands greater load flexibility from thermal power plants. Circulating Fluidized Bed (CFB) combustion systems, while offering fuel flexibility and high thermal inertia, face challenges in maintaining hydrodynamic and thermal stability during load transitions. This study investigates partial flue gas recirculation (FGR) as a strategy to enhance short-term load flexibility in a 1 MW_th CFB pilot plant fired exclusively with solid recovered fuel. Two experimental test series were conducted. Under conventional operation, where fuel and fluidization air are reduced proportionally, load reductions to 86% and 80% led to operating regime shift. Particle entrainment from the riser to the freeboard and loop seal decreased, circulation weakened, and the temperature difference between bed and freeboard zone increased by 71 K. Grace diagram analysis confirmed that the system approached the boundary of the circulating regime. In contrast, the partial FGR strategy maintained total fluidization rates by replacing part of the combustion air with recirculated flue gas. This stabilized pressure conditions, sustained particle circulation, and limited the increase in the temperature difference to just 7 K. Heat extraction in the freeboard remained constant or improved, despite slightly lower flue gas temperatures. While partial FGR introduces a minor efficiency loss due to the reheating of recirculated gases, it significantly enhances combustion stability and enables low-load operation without compromising fluidization quality. These findings demonstrate the potential of partial FGR as a control strategy for flexible, waste-fueled CFB systems and supports its application in future low-carbon energy systems. Full article

Decarbonisation of urban energy and transportation systems has become a priority for cities worldwide, with policies primarily aiming to promote rooftop solar electricity generation and a shift to private electric vehicles (EVs). However, these policies may also increase inequalities in access to affordable, low-carbon mobility and the associated benefits. While academic literature shows increasing awareness of these equity impacts and risks, the extent to which this applies to policy practice remains unclear. We therefore conducted a case study of seven Dutch cities, analysing local policy documents and conducting interviews with policymakers. The study provided insight into the current policy landscape and revealed a general sensitivity among interviewed policymakers to possible equity impacts of the current decarbonisation policies. Only a few measures to address these impacts are currently in place, but policymakers have proposed a range of novel and more inclusive measures, which can be tested for their impacts and scaling potential in real-life experiments. Another priority for future research is exploring the potential of shared electric mobility to provide equitable access to low-carbon transportation. Full article

This research aims to evaluate and highlight the potential mesostructured architecture of established behaviours and operational practices based on the working model change imposed by the pandemic emergency in the public sector. After the intervention of an exogenous shock, the readiness, perceived usefulness and ease-of-use of technologies made the Technology Acceptance Model [TAM] verifiable. Concurrently, it is also possible to verify the Theory of Planned Behaviour [TPB] in the motivation and intention to change employees’ working habits under the lens of complexity and urgency, involving a From Knowledge To Knowledge Strategy [FKTKS]. The research protocol encompasses semi-structured interviews with public managers in Italy, alongside a perceptual and sentiment trend analysis of 70 public employees [35 females and 35 males] regarding their sentiments on digital transition and smart/hybrid working habits before, during, and after the pandemic. In the public sector, change is perceived as a shock-generative tension. In this way, the research aims to answer the genderised issue related to the perception and the persistence of using digital tools in the workplace during the post-urgency period as a regular habit based on perceived usefulness and ease-of-use. The study highlights a gender-specific trend in the use of the smart/hybrid working model after the health emergency. This propensity may also be attributable to the gender traits defined by Hofstede, within whose paradigm the interpretative dynamic provided is embedded. The during-COVID-19 acceptance and usage behaviours define an element related to masculinity because of its urgency and pressing deadlines. In contrast, endurance connects to femininity, emphasising resilience and long-term goals. This approach prioritises resilience and comprehensive well-being, focusing on achieving a good work–life balance [WLB] rather than just addressing immediate issues. Full article

Energy poverty presents a variety of complex challenges relating to equity, public health and territorial sustainability. Despite growing attention across European policy agendas, responses remain fragmented and often disconnected from local needs. This study proposes a strategic framework to promote social inclusion, territorial resilience, and multilevel governance in addressing energy poverty. The methodological approach is divided into three main phases. First, a literature review based on PRISMA guidelines was conducted, covering reports and pilot projects from 2010 to 2024. An inductive–deductive model was then used to analyse the literature, identifying five thematic areas and recurring gaps. The ultimate goal was to develop a framework that would tackle energy poverty. The results reveal persistent gaps: fragmented indicators, underdefined vulnerable groups, weak integration between energy and health policies, limited financial accessibility, and uncoordinated governance. In response, the paper introduces the Integrated Energy Resilience and Inclusion Network (IERIN), a governance-based framework structured around four conceptual pillars: equity, adaptability, participation, and proximity. The Nesima district of Catania is proposed as an exploratory context to test the framework and refine participatory tools. The study outlines practical strategies for achieving energy equity through co-design, cross-sectoral planning, and inclusive financing. The study outlines practical strategies for achieving energy equity through co-design, cross-sectoral planning, and inclusive financing. Full article

In order to meet the Paris Agreement and EU Green Deal, the demand for critical minerals (e.g., cobalt, nickel, lithium, and rare earth elements) is growing exponentially. With their demand arise urgent concerns about the injustices of their supply chain, including concerns about labour exploitation, environmental degradation, and child labour. This literature review examines news media, blogs, governmental and NGO reports, and academic sources to assess the risk of child labour in the extraction of 34 EU-designated critical minerals, 17 of which are considered ‘strategic.’ Using a combined risk reduction and assessment framework, the study identifies high-risk minerals (cobalt, graphite, nickel, aluminium, copper, and rare earth elements) and high-risk countries (the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mozambique, India, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Myanmar). The findings reveal the broader negative impact on communities of mining, including increased vulnerability to child trafficking and sexual exploitation. Thus, the risk of child labour does not imply its actual occurrence due to the biased undercount of child labour numbers. Recommendations include further research, raising awareness of children’s rights, supporting household livelihoods, and improving traceability in artisanal and small-scale mining to ensure a just transition. Full article

The article explores how pro-environmental action relates to knowledge processes and fosters transformative changes in vulnerable settings. Drawing on eleven pro-environmental initiatives in five countries (Bulgaria, Hungary, Portugal, Romania and Türkiye), the study focuses on locally embedded actions responding to environmental threats, biodiversity loss and traditional practices. Based on 71 semi-structured interviews with citizens, we captured how environmental stewardship is shaped through lived experience, situated knowledge and shifting roles of actors under variable, often adverse governance conditions. We found that knowledge emerges as a co-produced and relational process, blending scientific, traditional, experiential and process-related knowledge. This supports participation and legitimacy and enables transformative (or behavioural) change. Transformative outcomes appear as behavioural shifts, self-empowerment, increased community agency and broader societal signals evolving from participation. The article contributes to the debate on sustainability transformation as it showcases potentially uncharted factors in current sustainability transition studies, i.e., emotional, political and relational dimensions of local pro-environmental actions in vulnerable settings. Even if systemic conditions limit transformative processes, this practical knowledge might be scaled up or adapted to other local or regional contexts to confront dominant socio-economic models and propose more inclusive, just and sustainable alternatives. Full article