The economy of China keeps increasing at high rate, although a bit slower recently than in the past due to the international economic turmoil. The Chinese economic performance affects the world economy in many ways (from increased primary resource and commodity imports to a more active financial...

The belief that small hydropower (SHP) systems are sources of clean energy with few or no ecological problems has been driving the rapid expansion of SHP plants in China and elsewhere. This paper presents an evaluation of the ecological impacts of SHP based on an emergy analysis of a plant...

The thermodynamic efficiency and the environmental sustainability of selected processes that deliver gaseous energy carriers (natural gas, syngas from coal gasification, and hydrogen from steam reforming of natural gas and alkaline electrolysis) is explored by means of a multi-criteria,...

The paper discusses the similarities and the incompatibilities between two forms of Energy Analysis (exergy and emergy, ‘EXA’ and ‘EMA’ in the following), both of which try to represent the behavior of physical systems by means of cumulative energy input/output methods that result in a...

This paper focuses on a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of four waste management strategies: landfill without biogas utilization; landfill with biogas combustion to generate electricity; sorting plant which splits the inorganic waste fraction (used to produce electricity via Refuse Derived Fuels,...

Bioenergy is one of the most dynamic and rapidly changing sectors of the global energy economy. The use of food crops for conversion to biofuel has been criticized for several reasons, among which its competition with the global food chain. Instead, lignocellulosic substrates are claimed to...

The paper is concerned with the results of a thorough energy and life cycle assessment (LIA) of CdTe and CIS photovoltaic modules. The analysis is based on actual production data, making it one of the very first of its kind to be presented to the scientific community, and therefore especially...

The<strong> </strong>emergy concept, integrated with a multi-objective linear programming method, was used to model the agricultural structure of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region under the consideration of the need to develop a low-carbon economy. The emergy indices before and after the structural optimization...

Ethanol production from wheat has become an emerging economic activity in Henan Province due to the establishment in 2001 of the National Program for Alcohol Production. The program aimed at facing the unfolding world energy crisis in the near future and increasing China's energy security....

Emergy Accounting and Synthesis, developed by Howard Odum in the 1980s, accounts for both the work of nature and that of humans as part of it in generating products and services. Since the 1990s, when Odum's system theories and emergy approach were introduced to China, a great attention was paid...