Zero energy. A energia solar como veículo para a sustentabilidade e rentabilidade de uma exploração agricola

• Autor(es): Carvalho, Pedro Miguel Lavareda
• Data: 2010
• Identificador Persistente: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.5/3361
• Origem: Repositório da UTL
• Assunto(s): agriculture; solar energy; sustainable development; cost-effectiveness; technological change
• Tipo de Documento: Dissertação de mestrado
• Idioma: Português
• Orientador(es): Duarte, Elizabeth Fernandes de Almeida
• Contribuidor(es): Repositório da Universidade de Lisboa

Descrição

Mestrado em Engenharia do Ambiente - Tecnologias Ambientais - Instituto Superior de Agronomia

In a world where the problems and concerns over the environment are growing, mainly associated to the GHG emissions, taking more sustainable behaviors it’s imperative in all business sectors. Throughout its history, agriculture has become technologically modern in order to be able to meet the food needs of an increasingly large and consumerist population, and at the same time, staying profitable in an increasingly competitive market. This trend of technological change has also occurred in renewable energy, particularly solar energy. This work aimed to demonstrate the opportunity, necessity and importance of adopting an agriculture vision, which promotes a more sustainable development through the implementation of several technologies for harnessing solar energy on a farm, increasing its cost-effectiveness too. The adopted approach consisted on energy consumption analysis (electricity and heat) of a prototype farm, based on real data from two types of farming (livestock and horticulture), which were subsequently implemented several technologies for harnessing solar energy (solar photovoltaic, solar thermal and solar passive), making the operation environmentally more sustainable by reducing the use and the dependence of fossil fuels, and economically more viable, with reduced consumption and direct sales of energy produced to the electric grid. Based on the collected information on the ground and after construction of the prototype, where some energy consumption process were added, aimed to include greater representation at national level, were evaluated various possibilities of using solar energy in the prototype, implementation, cost / benefit and environmental sustainability, using tree international computational software’s (PVsyst, Sunny Design and Wica). It was concluded that the Solar Energy and Agriculture could and should have a Convergent Future!