Renewable Energy Utilization and Energy Conservation in Thermal and Power Systems for China’s Sustainable Energy Future

The special collection on Renewable Energy Utilization and Energy Conservation in Thermal and Power Systems for China’s Sustainable Energy Future is available in the ASCE Library (https://ascelibrary.org/page/jleed9/renewable_energy_utilization).

Development of renewable energy sources and improvement of energy utilization efficiency of conventional energy sources are the two most promising solutions for a sustainable energy future. In China, where conventional energy currently dominates the power supply, new energy development is one of the most crucial factors that could shape its sustainable energy future. Recent studies have predicted that China’s renewables share will likely increase significantly in the next two decades, which implies tremendous opportunities for investment.

The energy systems in China are facing various challenges due to a rapidly increasing share of intermittent renewable energy sources and the competition between conventional and renewable energy sources. Therefore, the integration of different energy forms and variable sources and the efficient and synergistic utilization of these energies will be a key focus in future developments. In fact, research on the transformation of China’s energy systems has been underway in many aspects, from energy transport, to conversion and utilization processes, to integrated energy system analysis, to new system design and optimization.

Contained in this special issue, the authors have introduced new concepts, approaches, and/or innovative solutions to address the problems and challenges faced by China’s energy systems that could potentially contribute to China’s sustainable energy future. The topics include photovoltaic (PV), photo-thermal (PT), and wind power systems (Chen et al. 2017b; Ren et al. 2017; Xu et al. 2018); clean combustion (Gao et al. 2017); battery (Fu et al. 2017a; Xu et al. 2017a); fuel cells (Zheng et al. 2017), large-scale sensitive and phase-change heat storage (Dai et al. 2017; Yang et al. 2017b, c; Zhang et al. 2017); energy conservation of data center (Song et al. 2017); distributed energy systems and microgrid (Deng et al. 2018; Luo et al. 2018; Xu et al. 2017b); clean heating with curtailed wind power (Fu et al. 2017b; Yang et al. 2017a); and new analysis, design, and optimization methods of integrated energy systems (Chen et al. 2017a; Dai et al. 2017; Li et al. 2017; Zhou et al. 2017).