Be-Safe - Reliable design of industrial energy systems with uncertain input data

 

Background

To ensure the security of energy supply, high safety margins are added to the expected maximum loads during the design phase of industrial energy systems and individual components are planned redundantly. A particularly high requirement applies to energy systems with thermal demand (heating, cooling, steam) since the supply cannot be provided by external sources such as the power grid. The resulting conservative design variant is rarely efficient and leads to unnecessary costs and CO₂ emissions. Nevertheless, it is used in practice because suitable tools for individual and detailed planning are lacking or because such a planning effort does not amortize, especially in the case of medium-sized companies.

 

Project objectives

The projetc's objective is to develop methods for the optimal design of energy systems for industrial sites with high thermal loads based on uncertain input data and under consideration of unplannable plant failures. The methods aim to individually generate valid thermal load profiles for a energy system from small and incomplete data sets. Based on these load profiles, the methods allow evaluating and mathematically optimizing the reliability of an energy system.

  Copyright: © Institute of Technical Thermodynamics, RWTH Aachen University

The optimization systematically takes uncertainties in the expected demand into account. This also enables a multi-criteria design considering reliability, costs and CO₂ emissions.

  Copyright: © BMBF

The methods enable planning bureaus, energy system operators and systems constructors to evaluate the security of energy supply of different variants and to estimate the additional costs. Thus, they can design energy systems reliably and efficiently and avoid up to 6 million tons of unnecessary CO₂ emissions. The project partners will prototypically implement the developed methods in software demonstrators to ensure practicality.