This thesis addressed the need for improved analysis and interpretation of primary meter half-hourly energy consumption data. The current work offers a novel benchmarking technique that was tested for 6 types of municipal buildings. This approach is different from conventional annual benchmarking mainly because it uses electricity and gas data in half-hourly periods, together with outside temperature data. A survey to European local authorities’ metering and monitoring practices was conducted in order to assess municipal energy managers' current procedures and needs in terms of data analysis to assess building energy performance and to identify potential energy saving opportunities. The benchmarking approach was developed considering the energy managers’ needs, but also the state-of the art in terms of building energy monitoring techniques, particularly building energy signatures, and the analysis techniques used on electricity grid demand forecasting. The benchmarking approach is based on the use of a metric composed of several indicators that are related to the load demand shape profile and the building energy signature. The comparison of indicators for buildings of the same type using standard scores identifies uncommon load demand profile characteristics and/or gas dependency on outside temperature in specific buildings. The metric is able to support the identification of potential energy wastage, which is linked to the detection of opportunities to save energy. The benchmarking technique was tested in 81 municipal building owned by Leicester City Council. This methodology can be applied to any non-domestic building equipped with primary meters for registering half-hourly electricity and gas consumption. In theory, this approach can also be applied to residential buildings, and to other short time series data types, for example quarter-hourly or 10 minutes interval data. The main contribution of this thesis is to improve the objectivity of building primary meter half-hourly electricity and gas consumption data analysis and interpretation by using quantitative parameters, instead of subjective visualisation techniques. The interpretation of building consumption data in short time series periods can now be streamlined, automated and perhaps incorporated in existing energy analysis software. This thesis raises questions that can lead to future research projects aiming to improve the metric and also to enlarge the scope of its application to national and European scale, to other building types and to other utilities.

The growth in the interdependence and complexity of socio-technical systems requires the development of tools and techniques to aid in the formulation of better policies. The efforts of this research focus towards developing methodologies and support tools for better policy design and formulation. In this thesis, a new framework and a systematic approach for the formulation of policies are proposed. Focus has been directed to the interactions between policy measures, inspired by concepts in process design and network analysis. Furthermore, we have developed an agent-based approach to create a virtual environment for the exploration and analysis of different configurations of policy measures in order to build policy packages and test the effects of changes and uncertainties while formulating policies. By developing systematic approaches for the formulation and analysis of policies it is possible to analyse different configuration alternatives in greater depth, examine more alternatives and decrease the time required for the overall analysis. Moreover, it is possible to provide real-time assessment and feedback to the domain experts on the effect of changes in the configurations. These efforts ultimately help in forming more effective policies with synergistic and reinforcing attributes while avoiding internal contradictions. This research constitutes the first step towards the development of a general family of computer-based systems that support the design of policies. The results from this research also demonstrate the usefulness of computational approaches in addressing the complexity inherent in the formulation of policies. As a proof of concept, the proposed framework and methodologies have been applied to the formulation of policies that deal with transportation issues and emission reduction, but can be extended to other domains.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-26T20:26:03Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Luis Fernando de Freitas Penteado.pdf: 691795 bytes, checksum: 803fd93930323302ac5d26921cf12a66 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2007-10-08 / Although the problem related to the weather change has been widespread only in the last decades, it is not recent the concern of the international community in the adoption of measures for the mitigation of this change in the ecosystem balance. The Kyoto Protocol, however, comes as the concrete awareness of the need of acting towards the reduction of the greenhouse effect, which causes such changes in our weather, noticed, mainly, through the global warming. The main means designed by that international treaty is the possibility of compensating the emissions of the gases accountable for the greenhouse effect (GEG Greenhouse Effect Gases), which is possible only through the transaction of the Credits of Emission Reduction - CERs, commonly known as Carbon Credits. Its example was followed, individually, by several other countries, being its idea adopted, even by Brazil, most accurately by São Paulo Estate, which improved its concept in the reduction of the concentration in the atmosphere of some polluting gases and of particulated material. However, a lot is asked about the compatibility of the above mentioned Protocol inside the principles and main regulations of our Environmental Law, and also, about what would be the environmental civil responsibility of the people engaged in the projects, related to a possible not fulfilling of the reduction of the emissions, as declared in each case. In this paper, we will demonstrate the perfect compatibility among the projects that give rise to the getting of the Credits of Reduced Atmospheric Emissions and our main laws related to the environment protection, as well as to the Environmental Law Principles. Finally, we will also, as an important part of this paper, analyses the environmental civil responsibility of the people in charge of keeping the commitments made when a project is implemented, aiming at obtaining the Credits of the Reduced Atmospheric Emissions / Apesar de somente nas últimas décadas o problema relativo às mudanças climáticas ter ganhado a repercussão que lhe é devida, não é de agora a preocupação da Comunidade Internacional na adoção de medidas para mitigação dessa alteração ao equilíbrio ecossistêmico. O Protocolo de Quioto representa a concretização da necessidade de se agir de modo a reduzir o chamado efeito estufa, causador de tais mudanças em nosso clima, sentidas, principalmente, com o aquecimento global. O principal instrumento idealizado por este Tratado Internacional encontra-se na possibilidade de se compensar as emissões dos gases responsáveis pelo efeito estufa (GEE Gases de Efeito Estufa), ato que é possível apenas via transação das Certidões de Redução de Emissões - RCEs, popularmente conhecidas como Créditos de Carbono. Seu exemplo foi seguido ainda individualmente, por outros diversos países, chegando sua idéia a ser adotada inclusive pelo Brasil, mais precisamente pelo Estado de São Paulo, que aprimorou seu conceito na redução da concentração na atmosfera de alguns gases poluentes e de material particulado. Entretanto, muito se questiona doutrinariamente acerca da compatibilidade do referido instrumento com nosso Direito Ambiental, princípios e principais normas, e ainda sobre qual seria a responsabilidade civil ambiental daqueles envolvidos nos projetos, frente a um eventual não cumprimento da redução das emissões, conforme declarado em cada caso. Demonstrar-se-á, ao longo do texto, a perfeita compatibilidade entre os projetos que dão ensejo à obtenção dos Créditos de Emissões Atmosféricas Reduzidas e as nossas principais leis relativas à proteção do meio ambiente, bem como aos princípios de Direito Ambiental. Por fim, sendo ainda o foco principal do presente estudo, será analisada a responsabilidade civil ambiental dos responsáveis pela manutenção dos compromissos acordados quando da implementação de um projeto visando à obtenção dos Créditos de Emissões Atmosféricas Reduzidas

Human activities have increased the concentration of CO2 into the atmosphere, thus it has caused global warming. Construction equipment are semi-stationary machines and spend at least 30% of its life time during idling. The majority of the construction equipment is diesel powered and emits toxic emission into the environment. In this work, the idling will be investigated through adopting several statistical regressions models to quantify the fuel consumption of construction equipment during idling. The regression models which are studied in this work: Multivariate Linear Regression (ML-R), Support Vector Machine Regression (SVM-R), Gaussian Process regression (GP-R), Artificial Neural Network (ANN), Partial Least Square Regression (PLS-R) and Principal Components Regression (PC-R). Findings show that pre-processing has a significant impact on the goodness of the prediction of the explanatory data analysis in this field. Moreover, through mean centering and application of the max-min scaling feature, the accuracy of models increased remarkably. ANN and GP-R had the highest accuracy (99%), PLS-R was the third accurate model (98% accuracy), ML-R was the fourth-best model (97% accuracy), SVM-R was the fifth-best (73% accuracy) and the lowest accuracy was recorded for PC-R (83% accuracy). The second part of this project estimated the CO2 emission based on the fuel used and by adopting the NONROAD2008 model.  Keywords:

隨著全球溫室氣體排放量的增長，氣候變遷帶來的衝擊益加嚴重，京都議定書的三種彈性減量機制為人類對抗氣候變遷帶來了新的契機，「碳交易」及「碳市場」於焉而生。為與國際的潮流接軌，立法院於2015年6月15日三讀通過了《溫室氣體減量及管理法》，嗣經總統於同年7月1日公布施行，我國將可藉由「總量管制與排放交易」(Cap and Trade)的實施，建立一個強制性的碳市場。本論文以市場規模最大的歐盟及中、美兩大排碳國為例，探討它們碳市場發展的經驗，並將重點聚焦在其歷史背景、制度面的設計、碳交易的情形及執行減量的成效上，希望從中找出我國碳交易可以學習與借鑑的地方。 歐、美及中國的碳市場各在不同的背景之下產生，歐盟及中國以強制性市場為主，美國則以自願性市場為主。本論文發現，歐盟排放交易體系(EU ETS)及中國的7個碳試點，其發展有賴明確的溫室氣體減量目標與碳交易的強制規定作為基礎，此正是美國碳市場所缺乏的。芝加哥氣候交易所(CCX)本質上其實類似歐盟及中國的碳市場，它們最大的差別在於：前者可由企業自行決定加入與否，後兩者則強制達一定排放量的企業加入。CCX失敗的例子，恰恰說明了缺乏國家明確方向的指引，單靠企業憑良心加入的自願性市場，發展仍然有限。 最後，本論文提出對我國碳交易後續規劃方向的7項建議，以及後續論文研究方向的3項建議。 / With the rapid growth of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, impacts of climate change become more serious. To reduce GHG emissions, the Kyoto Protocol was adopted in 1997 and entered into force on 16 February 2005. Various carbon markets have been structured at the domestic or international level, especially since the introduction of three flexible mechanisms under the Kyoto Protocol. To demonstrate Taiwan’s commitment to combating climate change in line with the global trend, the Greenhouse Gas Emission Reduction and Management Act was promulgated by the president on 1 July 2015. It provides a legal basis for establishing a cap and trade system, and a compliance carbon market will be structured in Taiwan. In this paper, we consider the world’s three major carbon markets, the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS), the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) and the Chinese seven official ETS pilots. This study seeks to provide some suggestions for future carbon transactions in Taiwan from their evolution experiences. The discussions developed in this study will focus on their historical backgrounds, system designs, allowance transactions, and emission reductions achievement. By comparing their evolution experiences, we find critical success factors behind carbon markets. Finally, suggestions for Taiwan’s government and future researches are presented.