Decision Support for the Planning of Production Systems for Renewable Resources

For the substitution of fossil fuels with renewables, the use of biomass in production processes is often considered ambivalent regarding economic viability and other sustainability criteria. To address the sustainability and efficiency concerns associated with biomass conversion, concepts for multi-input and multi-output biorefineries have been discussed and tested. However, lacking economic viability, none have been realized on an industrial scale until today. Instead, biogas plants, mostly used for combined heat and power generation, have become the most prevalent biomass conversion process in Germany. Incentivized by feed-in tariffs and other subsidies, almost 10,000 biogas plants operate in Germany in 2019. These and other biomass-fueled plants can produce power flexibly, but at higher cost than most other renewable and fossil power plants. In order to make sound decisions for production systems for renewable resources, comprehensive decision support is needed. The choices of capacity, configuration and location are among the major challenges for the planning of such production systems. This habilitation elaborates decision support by considering relevant strategic and operational aspects of production systems for renewable resources. The covered strategic aspects concentrate on the interdependent choices of plant capacity, configuration and location, which are addressed with nonlinear programming and geographic information systems. For plants for the conversion of biomass, large plant capacities lead to both economies of scale and rising specific transportation cost, which plays a major role for their economic viability. The operational aspect of scheduling flexible and programmable power generation and consumption is investigated as well because of its rising importance due to the increasing share of intermittent power generation from photovoltaic cells and wind turbines. Optimization models, application programming interfaces and available data sources are combined to offer the aspired decision support.2022-10-0

Estimating the revenue potential of flexible biogas plants in the power sector

The expansion of intermittent renewable power poses new challenges: Balancing fluctuations in power supply and demand requires additional flexibility. In this work, we model a unit commitment optimization problem to investigate the economic feasibility of concepts for flexible power generation from biogas. Because the economics of flexible power generation also depend on the availability of other flexibility options, we compared flexible biogas plants in power markets with different characteristics, namely Germany, northern Italy, and the islands of Sardinia and Sicily. Using an algorithm to optimize the constrained mixed-integer unit commitment of biogas plants, we determine hourly optimal production schedules in each region based on the prices from 2008 to 2017. The algorithm helps to assess whether the investment for equipment that required for flexible electricity production, such as a larger generator and storage facilities, would have been justified by the likely additional revenue in the investigated period. Our results show that the premium that flexible biogas plants can earn over non-flexible ones has decreased significantly between 2008 and 2017 in all investigated regions. Since 2015, additional incentives have been indispensable in all four investigated regions to make the concept of producing power from biogas flexibly economically viable

Ecological Assessment of Port Equipment for Container Terminals

Environmental protection and energy efficiency are important topics for sea port management, which is characterized by long-term investments. To assess the environmental impact of port equipment, we investigate different equipment types with fossil, hybrid and electric drive technologies, in cooperation with our project partner Hamburg Port Consulting (HPC). An ecological assessment of port equipment will support terminal operators who aim to make sustainable investment decisions. We conduct a comparative life cycle assessment (LCA) of different port equipment types including the three above-mentioned drive technologies. Various LCA impact categories, such as climate change, terrestrial acidification and particulate matter formation, were calculated and compared. Thus, we aim to foster a more comprehensive understanding of the environmental performance of port equipment. The results show the contribution of each life cycle phase to the environmental performance of an equipment type within each impact category and thus allow for a comparison of different port equipment types. So far, little comprehensive research exists regarding sustainable port operations. Especially, port operators often lack knowledge about the environmental impact of port processes, whereof it is necessary to provide a good basis to fill in this gap

SimBench—A Benchmark Dataset of Electric Power Systems to Compare Innovative Solutions Based on Power Flow Analysis

Gefördert durch den Publikationsfonds der Universität Kasse

MEO - Modellexperimente in der operativen Energiesystemanalyse

Dort, wo Modelle der operativen Energiesystemanalyse untereinander Überschneidungen aufweisen, stellt sich zunächst die Frage, ob sie bei gleichgearteten Fragestellungen auch die gleichen Antworten liefern. Dies zu beantworten war erstes Ziel des hier beschriebenen Vorhabens. Das zweite Ziel war, im Falle von Differenzen zu ermitteln, worin diese begründet liegen. Es waren nicht nur die Modelle selbst, sondern auch das methodische Vorgehen zur Modellerstellung und Simulation in Betracht zu ziehen. Die darauf aufbauende Identifikation von individuellen Optimierungspotenzialen war das dritte Ziel. Da die operative Energiesystemanalyse noch ein recht junger Forschungsbereich ist, existiert darüber hinaus Klärungsbedarf, welches Modell sich für welche Untersuchungen besonders eignet und welches methodische Vorgehen sich empfiehlt. Die Beantwortung dieser Fragen stellte das vierte Ziel des Vorhabens dar