Keeping in mind the short-term and long-term aims of cost depletion and sustainable development respectively, a joint water and energy management scheme for water supply systems that leads to reduced energy losses is proposed. For water utilities, drinkable water's treatment and pumping and wastewater treatment are the main energy-consuming processes and a proportional part of this energy is wasted with non-revenue water. In Romania, these losses can reach critical levels so highlighting them becomes a crucial aspect in assessing the system's efficiency. This paper presents a scheme that combines energy audit and water balance techniques that can become a tool for both energy auditors and managers, by allowing the quantification of embedded energy of water losses. The methodology is adapted for the conditions in Romania, where data collection and processing is mainly done manually.
As Cryptocurrency becomes more and more popular so does its demand for mining rigs. At the end of 2020 there were approximately 5,392 different cryptocurrencies available with a total market capitalization of more than $201bn [1]. Cryptocurrencies are using decentralized, distributed systems in order to operate. The mining process involves solving cryptographic equations, which are ultimately used for ensuring encryption of the blockchain transactions, through the use of IT equipment - the most efficient way of doing it being by building mining farms which use Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). The Crypto farmers are rewarded with a share of the transaction they facilitate. As the Cryptocurrency market grows exponentially every year, so does its hunger for energy. For example, the Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index is evaluated to reach 77.782 TWh/year in 2021 [2], which, for comparison, is approximately 1.5 times larger than the entire electricity consumption of Romania in 2020 [3]. In this paper, the transition of Cryptocurrency mining processes towards environmental sustainability will be analysed. A Crypto-farm’s Energy Performance Indicators (EPI) and Power Quality Indices (PQI) will be evaluated and, with the use of dedicated software solutions, the authors will propose an action plan to minimize the environmental impact of the energy boundary and to maximize the EPI, thus maximizing the profitability of this new type of business.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.