The most commonly used conversion methods – combustion of waste to produce heat or electricity; anaerobic digestion to produce methane for heat or power production etc. all are well-established and commercial technologies. A further set of conversion processes – for example, the production of liquid fuels from cellulosic materials by biological or thermochemical conversion processes, such as pyrolysis – are at earlier stages of commercialisation or still under development.

The Technology Needs Assessment (TNA) process identifies a country’s development priorities. These are derived from ongoing policies, programmes and projects, long-term vision documents as well as strategies for climate change mitigation and adaptation already in place. These development priorities are used along with climate mitigation and adaptation criteria for identifying highest priority (sub) sectors, and for prioritising technologies for mitigation and adaptation within these (sub) sectors.

The district heating net is a pipe network that supplies heating and hot water for connected consumers from a central power plant. It is a more efficient way to provide heat and power compared to localized boilers. District cooling is the cooling equivalent of district heating. Working in accordance to similar principles, district cooling delivers chilled water to buildings like offices and factories. Trigeneration is when electricity, heating and cooling are combined in the same plant.

Responds to the following needs

Wind energy technologies can be classified into two categories – macro wind turbines that are installed for large-scale energy generation such as wind farms, and micro wind turbines used for local electricity production. Micro wind turbines are suitable for application at the building scale and are called ‘building-integrated wind turbines’. The main components of a wind turbine include blades, rotor, gearbox and generator. Small wind turbines were originally designed with a horizontal axis, also known as HAWTs.

Total freshwater withdrawals reported for 163 countries by the Pacific Institute showed that in the median country residential water use accounted for 16% of total freshwater withdrawals (Gleick et al., 2006). Therefore, residential conservation efforts can make a strong positive contribution to reducing pressure on water resources. Reducing water use in municipal systems also contributes to climate change mitigation by decreasing energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.

Solar thermal technology can be used to provide heating for domestic or industrial uses. A solar heating system can capture the sun's radiation and use it for both hot water heating and supplement home heating by piping hot water through traditional or modern radiators, furnaces, or use it in hydronic system for in floor radiant heat. In most cases solar should be used with conventional power as a supplement, this way you never have to rely completely on the sun shinning. An important part of a home solar system is the controller. The controller senses input and output temperatures.

Manure coverage is the practice of covering the surface of manure with materials of certain thickness instead of the traditional method of piling up manure to be exposed to air. Manure coverage changes the amount of manure surface in contact with air. Due to some reactions, i.e., a series of physical, biological and chemical reactions, it can reduce GHG emissions.

Refrigerators are used in households across the world to store food at a temperature of about 3 to 5 °C (37 to 41 °F) in order prevent it from spoiling. This technology description focuses on refrigerators for residential use and on energy efficiency performance only. It does not take into account potential GHG effects caused by the refrigerant.

Cycling is a cheap, healthy, efficient form of transport that only produces greenhouse gases in the production and distribution of bicycles, and it is very well suited to short to medium travel distances. It is also very inexpensive for cities and other localities to develop cycling routes, relative to the cost of other transport infrastructure.

Combustion is the most common way of converting solid biomass fuels to energy. Worldwide, it already provides over 90% of the energy generated from biomass, a significant part of which in the form of traditional uses for cooking and heating. Biomass of different forms can also be used to produce power (and heat) in small-scale distributed generation facilities used for rural electrification, in industrial scale applications, as well as in larger scale electricity generation and district heating plants.