SSSoCo 2013 - Special Session on Soft-Computing Algorithms in Renewable Energy Problems

In the current context of world economic crisis, Renewable Energies are of crucial importance towards a cleaner and more sustainable future. Several factors have recently pushed Renewable Energies, such as recent proofs of the direct connection between global warming and CO2 emissions from fossil fuels, the intended reduction of greenhouse gasses thanks to the Kyoto protocol or the growing of the risk perception after the nuclear accident in Japan in December 2011, among others.
Nevertheless, the establishment and maximum exploitation of Renewable Energy still need a lot of work and research effort. Many of the problems that arise in Renewable Energy are so difficult, that traditional mathematical methods do not obtain good results. The design of new renewable energy facilities (wind farms, solar plants, smart and micro-grids with renewable generation, or stand-alone systems, etc.), the correct estimation of the renewable energy resource (wind, radiation, reservoir levels) or the optimization of technologies to obtain more productive systems (wind turbine design, solar panels design), are just some examples of these hard problems related to renewable energy.
In these problems, the use of Soft-Computing approaches has been massive in the last few years, as powerful computational methods that obtain good results, with moderate computational effort. This Special Session is focused on Soft-Computing approaches in Renewable Energy problems, in a broad sense. We consider all Renewable Energy technologies where Soft-Computing approaches can be used to improve the final systems. Real problems and case studies are particularly welcome.
For more information, see the special session web site http://nical.ustc.edu.cn/ideal13/ss_scarep.html.