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The post-harvest processing at fruit and vegetable pack-houses and logistic centers (FVPLC) in locations where, as it occurs in Southern Spain, these facilities and greenhouses co-exist in a dense and interconnected environment constitute an interesting field for the application of renewable sources of energy. The availability and conscious management of solar radiation, necessary for driving the greenhouses food production, as well as the availability of biomass, both in the form of plants wastes and, eventually, in the form energy crops allow to advance a high potential for the use of these renewable heat sources in such agro-industrial cluster constituted by greenhouses, FVPLC and auxiliary industries. In this work, it is carried the estimation of the values of some specific technical and environmental indexes of performance of the cold stores that are part of these facilities under two energy supply scenario: a conventional mains scenario and an alternative scenario in which cooling demand is fulfilled by thermally driven absorption devices. Cooling loads at regional and facility levels, the last thanks to the access to actual case studies, have been evaluated and used as input for the estimation and analysis of the following indexes under the two advanced scenarios: annual energy consumption, specific electricity consumption for cooling and equivalent CO 2 emissions.

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Nowadays, the world is involved in a process of change of the paradigm for the exploitation of the primary sources of energy aiming to reach a cleaner and more sustainable scenario for the fulfillment of the power demands of the society. Together to the incorporation to the mains of huge quantities of renewable electricity from wind and solar parks, many industries and dwellings are also currently using private small scale renewable installations for self-consumption and/or local grids balancing. This is due both to the competitive costs of the systems and to environmental consciousness of their users. Photovoltaic systems, including batteries, play a key role in this kind of installations, which, in general terms, must be also considered as part of the emerging smart distributed energy schemes. Engineers and technicians must them be trained in these new specific subjects which require a wider approach to the projects that must be tackled taking into account, instead than before, a multiplicity of possible operation modes for the own and neighbor installations according smart management schemes: fully autonomous, PVgrid tied, hybrid (PVgrid tied+battery)… This work describes an educational resource developed for the UAL engineering studies aiming to ease, throughout a direct and instrumental approach, the learning of the dynamic processes underlying these systems and their operations modes as well as the learning on the different installations elements specifications (PV modules, batteries, charge regulators, grid inverters,...) that constitute them.

Thermal Energy Storage is a key issue in concentrating solar power plants due to the need to tackle the conflict between dispatchability requirements of the utilities and the intermittent and unpredictable nature of solar radiation. In this context, molten salt tanks are the more widespread solution because of their effective trade-off between cost and functionality. This work presents a techno-economical assessment regarding the use of different salt mixtures as storage medium in a central receiver solar plant as well as the eventual improvement of its performance due to increasing the specific heat of the salts by the addition of nanoparticles. As case-study, an actual plant in southern Spain has been selected and System Advisor Model was adopted as performance estimation tool. After model validation, a sensitivity analysis involving plant indicators (E gen , CF, V TES , LCOE) and different storage scenarios was carried out. The results show no significant differences between commercial mixtures and an economical advantage of using nanoparticles.