In spite of technological, logistic and economic difficulties, interest in renewable energy sources in the world is consistently increasing. This trend is also observed in Poland, mainly due to the urgent need to tackle the problem of climate change, which is caused by the increasing concentration of gaseous pollutants in the atmosphere. The paper presents a short script of the issue of estimating renewable energy resources in Poland in the context of creating local low carbon economy plans at the level of municipalities/counties where RES sources should be taken into account. The author proposed an individual approach to estimate the potential of RES, taking the local conditions and the short characteristics of the small and medium companies sector in Poland into account. These companies have a great application potential to increase the share of renewable energies and to improve energy efficiency in their business. The actions, which are taken by the Ministry of Energy in the field of civil energy development, enhancing local energy security and the sustainable development of renewable energy resources support the development of energy clusters covering one district or five municipalities. In the article, the author presents data on the number of companies possessing a concession for generating electricity in RES installations in the power range from 40 kW to 200 kW. These companies can largely be the nucleus for creating a local cluster in which microgrids will be a key element.
The changes in the domestic solid fuel market (including forecasted increases in the fuel prices) and the growing requirements related to actual environmental standards, result in increased interest in renewable energy sources, such as biomass, wind and solar energy. These sources will allow to achieve reduction in the CO2 emission, and consequently – avoid environmental costs after 2020. Therefore, the development of distributed energy systems, based on the use of biomass boilers, gas boilers and high efficiency combined heat and power units, will enable the fulfillment of current standards in the field of energy efficiency and emission of pollutants to the atmosphere. It should be emphasized that the actions taken to reduce emissions (e.g. anti-smog act) will contribute to reducing coal consumption in the municipal and housing sector (households, agriculture and other customers) in favor of biomass and other renewable energy sources. The article reviews selected biomass technologies:
- fluidized, dust and grate boilers,
- straw-fired boilers,
- cogeneration systems powered by biomass,
- torrefaction and biomass carbonisation.
The mentioned technologies are characterized by a high potential of in the field of dynamic development and practical application in the coming years. Thus, they can improve difficult situation in the distributed energy sector with a capacity up to 50 MW.
In this article, the contribution of renewable energy sources (RES) to the worldwide electricity production was analyzed. The scale of development and the importance of RES in the global economy as well as the issues and challenges related to variability of these sources were studied. In addition, the chemical conversion of excess energy to renewable methanol has been presented. The European Union regulations and targets for the years 2020 and 2030 concerning greenhouse gases reduction were taken into consideration. These EU restrictions exact the further development of renewable energy sources, in particular, the improvement of their efficiency which is closely related to economics. Moreover, as a part of this work, energy storage were described as one of the ways to increase the competitiveness of renewable energy sources with respect to conventional energy. A method for the conversion of carbon dioxide separated from high-carbon industries with hydrogen obtained by the over-production of green energy were described. The use of methanol in the chemical industry and global market have been reviewed and thus an increasing demand was observed. Additionally, the application of renewable methanol as fuels, in pure form and after a conversion of methanol to dimethyl ether and fatty acid methyl esters has been discussed. Hence, the necessity of modifying car engines in order to use pure methanol and its combination with petrol also was analyzed.