The use of fossil fuels has contributed to climate change and global warming, which has led to a growing need for renewable and ecologically friendly alternatives to these. It is accepted that renewable energy sources are the ideal option to substitute fossil fuels in the near future. Significant progress has been made to produce renewable energy sources with acceptable prices at a commercial scale, such as solar, wind, and biomass energies. This success has been due to technological advances that can use renewable energy sources effectively at lower prices. More work is needed to maximize the capacity of renewable energy sources with a focus on their dispatchability, where the function of storage is considered crucial. Furthermore, hybrid renewable energy systems are needed with good energy management to balance the various renewable energy sources’ production/consumption/storage. This work covers the progress done in the main renewable energy sources at a commercial scale, including solar, wind, biomass, and hybrid renewable energy sources. Moreover, energy management between the various renewable energy sources and storage systems is discussed. Finally, this work discusses the recent progress in green hydrogen production and fuel cells that could pave the way for commercial usage of renewable energy in a wide range of applications.

Silica gel/water adsorption cooling systems suffer from size, performance and cost limitations. Therefore, there is a need for new adsorbent materials that outperform silica gel. Metal organic frameworks (MOFs) are new micro-porous materials that have extraordinary porosity and uniform structure. Due to the lack of published data that characterise MOF/water adsorption, this paper experimentally investigates the adsorption characteristics of HKUST-1 (Cu-BTC (copper benzene-1,3,5-tricarboxylate), C18H6Cu3O12) and MIL-100 (Fe-BTC (Iron 1,3,5-benzenetricarboxylate), C9H3FeO6) MOFs compared to silica gel RD-2060. The adsorption characteristics of Silica gel RD-2060, HKUST-1 and MIL-100 were determined using an advanced gravimetric dynamic vapour sorption analyser (DVS). Results showed that HKUST-1 performed better than silica gel RD-2060 with an increase of water uptake of 93.2%, which could lead to a considerable increase in refrigerant flow rate, cooling capacity and/or reducing the size of the adsorption system. However, MIL-100 MOF showed reduced water uptake comparable to silica gel RD-2060 for water chilling applications with evaporation at 50C. These results highlight the potential of using MOF materials to improve the efficiency of water adsorption cooling systems