Thanks to the same origin policy, other web apps can't access your API from the client. They will have to proxy their requests via the server, meaning these requests will come from a handful of easily identified IP addresses, which you can temporarily blacklist.
That said, it doesn't hurt to be prepared. If you want to avoid expensive legal battles, one thing you can do is change your API method signatures from time to time. Leaching apps can be fixed, but their reputation will steadily decline.
If your client has code that is hidden from snoopers, could you not do as you suggested, use salts, ip address and time based values, encrypt them and then do the same on the server end? This is basically what mod_auth_tkt does, and it works well. Or would that constitute authentication?
Do you control the other web service? Also, if your web app ( ) accesses the API ( ) via XHR or JSONP, could you proxy the data on your server by using a library such as cURL to get the data, and then make it available on your site. You could then control the access to it any way you see fit.
Conclusion: Many challenges and questions are raised when using the Delphi technique, but there is no doubt that it is an important method for achieving consensus on issues where none previously existed. Researchers need to adapt the method to suit their particular study.
Recent evidence indicates that the key sources of energy for the zero carbon transition will be renewable electricity sources. The most rapidly expanding sources, photovoltaics and wind produce work, as electricity, directly rather than via heat engines. Making the assumption that these will be the dominant sources of energy in a future zero carbon system, the paper makes two new related and innovative contributions to the literature on the energy transition. First, it shows that the energy transition will be more than just a shift away from carbonaceous fuels, and that it is more usefully thought of as including a systemic shift from heat-producing to work-producing energy sources. Secondly, it shows that this enables very large improvements in the conversion efficiency of final energy, through the use of electricity and hydrogen, in particular in heating and transportation. The paper presents a thought experiment showing a reduction in final energy demand of up to 40% is likely from this effect alone. Technical standards and product regulation for end use conversion efficiency and/or service delivery efficiency seem likely to be key policy instruments.
The goals set out in the Paris Agreement almost certainly require the global energy system to move to close to zero emissions, as other emission sources may be harder to abate (Masson-Delmotte et al., 2018). This transition is normally thought of as a shift from carbon-based fuels to zero carbon fuels. This is understandable, but not an adequate approach to understanding a systemic transition. Not only will primary energy sources change, so also will the ways that they are converted and used. In particular, the direct use of fossil fuels in buildings, transport and industry will need to end, and this has significant implications for the types of final energy used and the efficiency of both upstream and downstream conversion processes.
Upstream conversion efficiencies are affected by the transition to RES, in particular through the phasing out of thermal power stations using fossil fuels. However, this paper focusses on the processes highlighted in Fig. 1, i.e. the conversion of final energy into useful energy. As the remainder of the paper shows, these efficiencies are also likely to be affected significantly by the energy transition.
In pre-industrial societies, the systems of provision for heating services and work were largely separate. Heat was largely produced from wood and was used for cooking, thermal comfort and services requiring hot water, as well as a few other specialised applications such as metal working. Work was provided, largely for motion, from different systems, mostly from the physical labour of humans (hence the name work) or by domesticated animals, with hydropower and wind power in specialised applications, such as milling grain.
The technological changes of the industrial revolution allowed the two systems to connect. This was principally by allowing heat to be converted into work, initially in the late eighteenth century using steam engines, but then from the late nineteenth century by the two dominant technologies of modern energy supply, the internal combustion engine and the turbo-generator. Both provide work from combustible fuels using a heat engine. The former is principally used for decentralised motive power, mainly in transportation. The latter, driven by steam turbines and more recently gas turbines, has become the main source of electricity generation, with electricity then distributed to provide a multiplicity of energy services, including motive power. The science of these conversions has been understood through the discipline of thermodynamics since the mid-nineteenth century.
The change to low-carbon, and ultimately zero carbon, energy systems seems highly likely to be a transition as fundamental as the changes of the industrial revolution. Current evidence indicates that the cheapest forms of low-carbon electricity will be renewable rather than nuclear and/or fossil fuels with carbon capture and storage (CCS). Already fossil fuels are being displaced from electricity generation by renewables (IRENA, 2020a). Whilst very high levels of variable RES create new challenges for system operators (Jones, 2017), these look soluble, allowing a transition to zero carbon electricity (NGESO, 2020).
Some non-academic literature has framed the overall process as a move away from combustion (Lovins, 2013; Patterson, 2014). However, the change is arguably even more fundamental. As shown in Figs. 3 and 4, it is a reversal of the changes that occurred during the industrial revolution. Instead of energy services that require work being provided from fuels via combustion and heat, energy services that require heat will be provided from energy sources that provide work. The whole architecture of energy systems will change, away from converting heat into work, towards converting work into heat.
With the conceptualisation of a shift from heat-producing to work-producing energy sources, the zero carbon energy transition may be thought of in three subsequent steps, each with implications for the efficiency of final energy conversion, and therefore the scale of final energy demand.
The electrolytic conversion process can approach 100% efficiency in theory, but in practice involves an efficiency penalty. However, conversion of hydrogen chemical energy to work using fuel cells enables it to be used more efficiently than fossil fuel in heat engines. The theoretical maximum electrical efficiency of a hydrogen fuel cell (determined by the ratio of the Gibbs free energy to the enthalpy) is 83% and achievable efficiencies exceed 50%. These are significantly higher than in a heat engine, where the theoretical efficiency is the Carnot limit and materials limit feasible operating temperatures and therefore the efficiency of conversion to work (Lutz et al., 2002). In summary, hydrogen may be used more efficiently than fossil fuels at the point of final energy conversion, because the chemical energy may be converted directly into work rather than heat.
For the purposes of this thought experiment, it is assumed that energy is generated entirely from work-producing RES. This is not intended to be a prediction or even a realistic scenario. Even in a 100% renewables scenario, bioenergy and geothermal may be expected to make a contribution. However, as set out above, it is widely expected that a zero carbon global energy system will be supplied largely by work-producing RES. It is therefore a reasonable first approximation, on which to base an assessment of the impact of the zero carbon transition on the end use conversion technologies needed.
Global energy demand, using a base year of 2020, is estimated from available sources. It is divided into different categories of energy use designed to provide different energy services (e.g. boilers for space heating, high-temperature industrial processes, heavy road freight transport). The extent of disaggregation is determined by the level required to make reasonable allocations into the three categories set out in the previous section, i.e.
The literature on energy efficiency is reviewed to identify existing efficiencies in both electrified and non-electrified cases. Detailed assumptions about conversion efficiencies are set out in Appendix 4. The same process is repeated for the same set of energy services delivered in a zero carbon system, using a mix of electricity and electrolytic hydrogen as the zero carbon vectors to supply final energy demand. The differences in efficiency are applied to current global final energy demand to calculate the size of global demand reduction.
The overall impact of the changes from converting the whole energy system, with a constant level of energy services and useful energy demands, to an efficient work-driven system is approximately a 40% reduction in final energy demand (see Fig. 5) from 416 to 247 EJ/year. The major efficiency gains are in buildings and transport where demand reductions exceed 50%. These are primarily due to converting building heating from fossil-fuelled boilers to electric heat pumps (EHPs) and from switching transport propulsion from internal combustion engines (ICEs) to electric vehicles (EVs). Energy demand reductions in industry are smaller (20%), as set out in Appendix 4, reflecting the high efficiencies already achieved in energy intensive industry sectors and the difficulties in switching some demands to electricity, especially where fuels play some other role such as a feedstock or chemical reducing agent.
Firstly, there remains significant scope for improvement in the energy efficiency with which energy services are produced from useful energy, for example in building insulation and vehicle design. The technical potential for such changes has been estimated to be 73% (Cullen et al., 2011). End use efficiency improvements, in the broadest sense, are therefore not restricted to those shown in Table 1 and Fig. 5. More substantial improvements are possible by combining the conversion efficiency improvements discussed in this paper with other energy efficiency techniques.
df19127ead