An overview of the concept and technology of ubiquitous energy

Kari Alanne and Sunliang Cao

Applied Energy, 2019, vol. 238, issue C, 284-302

Abstract: The continuous and rapid development of energy technology challenges the scientific community to ponder the long-term energy evolution from the perspective of sustainable energy transition. We state that one of the key challenges for the new (post-fossil) energy era is to guarantee to all energy users an access to adequate resources of energy everywhere and at any moment of time. To crystallize the key ideas of such a pervasive energy supply chain into a single concept, we introduce the concept ‘ubiquitous energy’. The main contribution of our paper is to create a discussion framework for the concept and to identify the most relevant technology pathways for the realization of ‘ubiquitous energy’. Hence, we first present the background of the concept and discuss matters concerning the ‘quality of energy to be present everywhere’. Secondly, we review the latest innovations in energy technology with respect to the energy supply chain and summarize technology pathways to ‘ubiquitous energy’. To that end, we describe a systematic framework to classify energy technologies under energy generation, storage, transmission and distribution. We conclude that ‘ubiquitous energy’ covers various solutions in both scope and degree of integration, but the most prominent trend of development is the use of distributed and shared resources and local energy supply chains. Here, the research should focus on integrated and mobile energy conversion and storage options and wireless power transmission.

Keywords: Sustainable energy; Renewable energy; Distributed energy; Shared energy; Prosumers (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306261919301011
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:appene:v:238:y:2019:i:c:p:284-302

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/405891/bibliographic
http://www.elsevier. ... 405891/bibliographic

DOI: 10.1016/j.apenergy.2019.01.100

Access Statistics for this article

Applied Energy is currently edited by J. Yan

More articles in Applied Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().