Energy and exergy analysis of typical renewable energy systems

The use of renewable energy systems for real life applications has been increasing for the last few decades due to the growing concern about the global warming and environmental pollution. The renewable energy sources are clean and freely available in the nature, however, the efficient utilization is still a cause of concern among the scientific and business communities. This paper presents an extensive literature review on both the energy and exergy analyses of typical renewable energy systems including, solar thermal, solar photovoltaic and biomass cookstove. Some important conclusions from the literature survey has been drawn and summarized in this paper. Among all important aspects studied and summarized in this paper, it is found that most of the analysis carried out for renewable energy systems so far is based on the energy analysis. Also for all renewable energy systems, the performance based on exergy analysis, in general, is found to be lesser than that of the energy analysis. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.