Power Plant Synthesis

Dimitris Al. Katsaprakakis holds a Mechanical Engineering degree (1997) and a PhD thesis (2007) from the National Technical University of Athens. He is an Associate Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department, Technological Educational Institute of Crete. His expertise focuses on wind parks and hybrid power plant development, the development of software tools for the optimization of hybrid power plants dimensioning, the impacts of RES projects on the natural environmental and human activities, and the social attitude towards RES projects applications. He has spearheaded the design and the study of eight hybrid power plants projects in the Greek islands that include wind parks and seawater pumped storage capabilities. Dr. Katzaprakakis has participated in several R&D projects funded by the EU, European/Greek industries and the Greek State, and he is the author of 14 papers in international journals, 2 chapters in international scientific books and more than 30 papers in international and national conferences.

• Introductory Concepts. Conventional Power Plants for Electricity Production. Electricity Production Hybrid Power Plants. Hybrid Plants for Thermal Energy Production. Cogeneration Power Plants. Smart Grids. Energy as a Consumptive Product.

"As Katsaprakakis makes clear in his preface and first chapter, modern society would be impossible without the large-scale conversion of naturally occurring energy to forms useful to humans—primarily, forms of electricity. After centuries of producing energy from fossil fuels, power plants are now moving toward renewable energy sources (RES), such as wind and solar power. Katsaprakakis acknowledges and embraces this trend in his text, especially through its detailed presentation of "hybrid" installations primarily in and around Europe, which rely on renewables as the primary source and resort to fossil fuels only as backup. Coverage of technologies, economics, and auxiliary topics, such as topography suitable for energy-storage reservoirs and the interpretation of daily usage data, is encyclopedic. Katsaprakakis' consulting experience allows him to give step-by-step design and operation instructions for a variety of actual cases. He writes at a more general level than authors of comparable works, which focus more on technical hardware details. By contrast, Katsaprakakis adopts a more black box or holistic approach. The text is written in a functional and readable style and should be useful especially to practitioners designing new hybrid plants."K. D. Stephan, Texas State University, USA