Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 11 (2007) 1888–1902 Renewislands—Renewable energy solutions for islands Fengzhen Chen à , Neven Duic, Luis Manuel Alves, Maria da Grac - a Carvalho Research Group on Energy and Sustainable Development, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Instituto Superior Te´cnico, Av. Rovisco Pais, 1049-001 Lisbon, Portugal Received 13 December 2005; accepted 23 December 2005 Abstract Increase of the global energy demand and environmental problems relating to fossil energy utilization request the new energy sources to replace the traditional fossil fuels. With respect to energy production, most of the islands in European Union and in the other parts of the world, depend on importation, mainly from oil and its related products. The global development of renewable energy technologies can assure sustainable supply of power for islands. To overcome the limitation of the sources of renewable energy, hydrogen is utilized as a storage medium integrated with intermittent renewable energy sources such as wind and solar. This paper introduces the programme of ‘‘Renewislands—Renewable Energy Solutions for Islands’’, the work tasks, details of the design of the activities to develop solutions integrating intermittent renewable energy supply (RES), fuel cell (FC) and hydrogen infrastructure to promote RES and innovative decentralized power systems penetration in islands; main results achieved in each work packages are presented; in addition, the development of intermittent renewable energy penetration in specific European Islands are reviewed briefly. r 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Islands; Intermittent; Renewable energy supply; Hydrogen; Integration system ARTICLE IN PRESS www.elsevier.com/locate/rser 1364-0321/$ - see front matter r 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.rser.2005.12.009 à Corresponding author. Tel.: +351 218417592; fax: +351 218475545. E-mail address: cfz@navier.ist.utl.pt (F. Chen).