This paper estimates a model of residential electricity demand to project the impact of proposed tariff changes on a representative sample of 130 Barbadian households. The results from the demand function suggest that the price elasticities of demand for particular appliances varied significantly, with households that utilize solar water heating being more price elastic than households that use...

Solar energy is an environmentally sustainable energy source as it is clean and inexhaustible. Solar systems are very common and cost-effective, thus, can be used for many home applications. In this paper, a new method is presented to optimize solar systems economically, regarding to energy cost fluctuations. In spite of conventional analyses, in which the inflation is considered constant, ...

A coronal heating model is proposed which predicts heating by a series of discrete events of various energies, analogous to the observed range of events from large scale flares through various transient brightening phenomena down to the often discussed “nanoflares”. We suggest that an energy release event occurs when a field becomes linearly unstable to ideal MHD modes, with dissipation during ...

g1 Richard Hall MEng, AIEMA EngD Researcher, Steel Construction Institute, Surrey EngD in Environmental Technology, University of Surrey, Guildford, UK g2 Xiaoxin Wang MSc, PhD Research Fellow, Oxford Institute for Sustainable Development, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK g3 Raymond Ogden DiplArch, PhD Professor, Oxford Institute for Sustainable Development, Oxford Brookes University, Oxfo...

The solar corona is a tenuous outer atmosphere of the Sun. Its million-degree temperature was discovered spectroscopically in the 1940s, but its origin has been debated since then without complete convergence. Currently there are two classes of models; the wave theory and the microflare/nanoflare theory. Both models have merits and disadvantages, but the essential issues are nearly pinned down....

Nanoscience provides many strategies to construct high-performance materials and devices, including solar cells, thermoelectrics, sensors, transistors, and transparent electrodes. Bottom-up fabrication facilitates large-scale chemical synthesis without the need for patterning and etching processes that waste material and create surface defects. However, assembly and contacting procedures still ...

Recent observations from the Hinode and Solar Dynamics Observatory spacecraft have provided major advances in understanding the heating of solar active regions (ARs). For ARs comprising many magnetic strands or sub-loops heated by small, impulsive events (nanoflares), it is suggested that (i) the time between individual nanoflares in a magnetic strand is 500-2000 s, (ii) a weak 'hot' component ...

Direct collection, conversion and storage of solar radiation as thermal energy are crucial to the efficient utilization of renewable solar energy and the reduction of global carbon footprint. This work reports a facile approach for rapid and efficient charging of thermal energy storage materials by the instant and intense photothermal effect of uniformly distributed plasmonic nanoparticles. Upo...

[1] Whether the phenomenology governing MHD turbulence is Kolmogorov or Iroshnikov‐Kraichnan (IK) remains an open question, theoretically as well as observationally. The ion heating profile observed in the solar wind provides a quantitative, if indirect, observational constraint on the relevant phenomenology. Recently, a solar wind heating model based on Kolmogorov spectral scaling has produced...