September 25-26, 2014, Tashkent, Uzbekistan

The main focus of the workshop is bringing together, to isolate and discuss less-explored issues of renewable energy from the viewpoint of advanced technology, resource-saving, sustainable energy producing, environmental issues and innovation management.

Effective and comercially competetive energy has become one of the factors for sustainable development both for developed and developing countries.

On the other hand, rapidly growing worldwide demand for energy and decreasing of hydrocarbon resources make important the problem of finding and developing alternative, renewable energy sources.

Different renewable energy sources such as wind, solar, biomass and hydro-power sources are step by step penetrating into the energy sectors of different developed countries. In addition, prospects for effective using of several renewable sources of clean energy like thermoelectric, hydrogen and geothermal energy are currently being investigated from the viewpoint of increasing their efficiency. It is remarkable to note that investment in the renewable energy sources, funding the research as well as corresponding market is growing year by year. Despite this fact the contribution of renewable energy in the glocal energy producing is quite small (less than 10 %). This is mainly causes by the fact that renewable energy sources are still far from being comercially competetive with those of traditional sources. Incresing such contribution depends on several factors such as flexible energy policy, marketing issues, R&D factors etc.

The latter requires discovering of advanced resource saving materials and advanced technology providing highly efficient conversion of energy by renewable sources.

In other words, to achieve feasible contribution to the global energy producing from the renewable sources, developing of innovative approach is needed. First of all, this implies increasing the conversion efficiency of renewable energy sources. For example, in case of solar cells discovering of new photovoltaic materials with highly efficient conversion properties is needed. As is well known, currently available solar cells have the conversion efficiency less than 30%. Researchers now are working on making of so lar cells whose efficiency is highern than 50% (so-called third generation solar cells) . In particular, carbon based and other types of nanomaterisl should lead 2-3- times increasing of the conversion efficiency of thermoelectric devices, while for solar cells expected effeiciency could exceed 60%. Third type of the renewable energy to be used as clean source not only for electricity but also as fuel for vahicles is hydrogen. Using hydrogen as the energy soruce is complicated by the absence of technology for its safe and comercially effective storage. It is expected that smerging area, nanotechnology should provide effectivve technologies ofr hydrogen storage. In Uzbekistan where the most of the part of the year (around 300 days) is always sunny, renewable energy based on solar power (photovolatics) and solar thermal energy has a bright future. Invited speakers are the experts are working on different issues of renewable energy such as photovoltaics, solar energy, hydrogen and biomass energy and economic aspects of renewable energy. Other participants will represent different universities and research institutes, commercial structures, government and private companies, including “Uzbekenergo”.