Energy Crisis and Resources
The global energy crisis has forced the finding of new resources given the fact that the traditional one’s coal, oil and gas are limited. The specialists’ searches in this field have led to the development of a new concept that being the sustainable development concept.
This concept involves mostly the use of green energies in order to protect the environment and to reduce the CO2 emissions, so comfort can be achieved for both residential and daily activities buildings. With many unclear elements during the crystallization period of the concept, today’s new direction of sustainable development started in Europe and it was immediately successful all over the world, from the USA to Japan.
This approach is a reaction to the chaotic development and urban agglomeration that exists nowadays in many cities around the world, with a huge waste of energy, but without clear principles that regulate the development of new and existing settlements.
The main beliefs of the concept nowadays are:
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Local environment conditions must be considered when building constructions, which must not be affected.
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In industrial applications as well as for comfort there must be used mainly energies from renewable ecological sources as solar, wind, air, earth and water.
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New architecture will be adapted to new ecological requirements, private renewable sources. The buildings shall be fitted with glazed surfaces so oriented as to allow the capture of solar energy for comfort. The architecture of the building will allow the placement of systems for the use of solar energy.
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In villages, the existing buildings must be upgraded using renewable energies for comfort, as for the waste energy sources, in local industries, there must be used for comfort but with extensive environmental protection measures.
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The transport’s development must be made in new, modern directions, using clean energies, such as electricity, hydrogen.
At European level, different programs have been applied and implemented providing for energy rehabilitation measures for existing buildings and new rules to increase thermal resistance for new ones. Few examples are the EPBD 2010 (Energy Performance of Building) and ErP Directive 2016 (Energy-related-products-directive). Romania has aligned with European requirements, building a legislation framework that fosters the use of clean energies. Regarding these energies, including the use of H2, it was drafted the Law No. 34/2017, which envisages the construction of an infrastructure for the use of alternative fuels. The law regulates the measures aimed at installing alternative fuel infrastructure, with the aim of reducing dependence on oil and thereby mitigating the environmental impact of transport. Requirements are laid down for the creation of alternative fuel infrastructure, recharging points for electric vehicles, compressed gas refuelling, liquefied gas and hydrogen (Mateescu, 2017), (Badea, 2017).
The energy used today in comfort systems is currently obtained from the combustion of fuels, fact which leads to a significant intake of CO2 in the environment. Reducing the CO2 emissions is a national, European, and worldwide important objective. The use of energy from renewable sources, including H2 represents a permanent preoccupation for every specialist. In the last 70 years, research institutes and colleges from the higher education institutions in Bucharest, Cluj-Napoca, Iasi, Timisoara and Brasov, Romania have had particularly interesting results with serial production applications to the user on renewable energies (Ivan, G., 2017).
One of the methods in order to reduce these emissions is to adopt H2 in energy production systems used in heating, air conditioning, cooling, electricity generation systems to achieve light comfort etc. So basically, adapting the comfort systems to new methods of energy production using H2 so the comfort in people’s houses/buildings would continue to be but without so much pollution. The energy obtained from hydrogen, is one of the “clean” energies, like the ones from renewable energy. It is not always the current technological level that allows us to use renewable energies in an economically and efficient way. The U.S. Department of Energy in New York in 2017 shows some economic shortcomings in renewable energy production, regarding the number of employees in each branch relative to each percentage contribution to total energy produced. In this way, by 2016, the U.S. levels were as follows.
Table 1. The U.S. Energy producer per sector in 2016
| Energy producer sector | Number of employees | Energy produced per employee
MWh | Percentage share of total electricity produced in the U.S. |
| Natural gases | 398000 | 3812 | 33,80% |
| Coal | 160000 | 7745 | 30,40% |
| Wind | 100000 | 836 | 5,60% |
| Sun | 374000 | 98 | 0,90% |
Since wind and sun energies are only available intermittently about 15-30% of the year and must be doubled by systems based on fossil fuels, as well as the fact that the energy obtained from gas and coal is cheaper than the other two, we can find that currently obtaining energy from these sources in unprofitable. These inconveniences do not occur when using H2.
Currently, energy generation technologies using free renewable energy sources are not of a nature to meet the requirements of sustainable development.