The division ELECTA is part of the Department of Electrical Engineering (ESAT)

Greenhouse gas emissions in the nuclear life cycle: A balanced appraisal

In order to combat global warming,a detailed knowledge of the greenhouse gas(GHG)emissions associated with different energy conversion technologies is important. For nuclear energy, GHG emissions result from different process stages of the whole fuel cycle. A life-cycle assessment offers the possibility to properly calculate these emissions. In the past, both indirect energy use and GHG emissions were studied by many researchers. Most of the studies result in low indirect emissions comparable to windturbines.

Read full story

Popular content

The Participation in Ancillary Services by High Capacity Wind Power Plants: Reserve Power

By UIE webmaster / Published on Thu, 02/11/2010 - 17:31

The Transmission System Operator (TSO) is responsible for a stable and secure exploitation of the electricity grid in its control zone. This is mainly achieved by contracting power generators delivering ancillary services in addition to their main commercial product, active power. Electricity from Renewable Energy Sources (RES-e) is today generally exempted from the participation in ancillary services. However, the increasing share integration of variable RES-e with a limited predictability has an impact on the demand and supply structure of these services.

Read full story

Towards an international tradable green certificate system—The challenging example of Belgium

By UIE webmaster / Published on Tue, 02/09/2010 - 12:40

In Europe, a common framework for renewable energy sources (RES) is aspired. Tradable green certificates (TGCs) are a marketbased cost-efficient means to stimulate electricity production from RES. Since TGCs are the most widespread support scheme in Europe together with feed-in tariffs, chances are that a common European framework could well be based on TGCs. However, while integrating currently existing different national TGC systems, any remaining differences should be carefully considered.

Read full story

Case-study of an Educational Engineering Project: a Series Hybrid Electric Kart

By UIE webmaster / Published on Mon, 02/08/2010 - 17:07

The students enrolled in the Energy Master’s program at the K.U.Leuven are expected to study and develop a series hybrid electric go-kart during their first Master year. Their main goal is to develop control algorithms in Matlab/Simulink for the different power electronic modules present on the kart. This allows students to work in small sub-groups, each group focusing on their own specific problem. At the end of the project, the solutions found by the separate groups are combined, and integrated on the kart’s single board computer which governs the power electronic modules.

Read full story

Market coupling and the importance of price coordination between power exchanges

By UIE webmaster / Published on Fri, 02/05/2010 - 15:03

In Europe, market coupling stands for a further integration of wholesale trading arrangements across country borders. More specifically, it refers to the implicit auctioning of cross-border physical transmission rights via the hourly auctions for electric energy organized by power exchanges (PEXs) one day ahead of delivery. It therefore implies that the PEXs can optimize the clearing of their day-ahead auctions. Due to verticals in the aggregated order curves, the optimal solution can be settled at different prices.

Read full story

Testbeds for Assessing Critical Scenarios in Power Control Systems

By UIE webmaster / Published on Thu, 02/04/2010 - 12:09

The paper presents a set of control system scenarios implemented in two testbeds developed in the context of the European Project CRUTIAL - CRitical UTility InfrastructurAL Resilience. The selected scenarios refer to power control systems encompassing information and communication security of SCADA systems for grid teleoperation, impact of attacks on inter-operator communications in power emergency conditions, impact of intentional faults on the secondary and tertiary control in power grids with distributed generators.

Read full story