Conference: Strategies for the development of sustainable distributed energy supply systems

Anastasiia Savchenko (PhD student at the National Technical University of Ukraine (NTUU), formerly “KPI” (Kiev Polytechnique Institute)

Energy is central to nearly every major challenge and opportunity the world faces today. Due to growing demand, rising fossil-fuel prices, international pressure to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and the fast development of urban and rural areas there is a need for continuous development of energy systems, and creation of new approaches in order to build sustainable energy systems, where both the generation and consumption sides are efficient from economical, technical and ecological points of view. One crucial factor for the optimal development of such areas is the satisfaction of the energy demand on electricity, high and low temperature heat, and domestic hot water supply.

The growing variety of available energy conversion units (e.g. micro-turbines, fuel cells, motor based co-generation units, heat storage units, solar units, modern power plants) and the conflicting criteria regarding the quality of the energy supply systems (e.g. yearly overall costs, CO2 -emissions, yearly primary energy consumption) lead to large number of structural and operational variants to be considered.

 

In this work, the heating load of consumers is taken as a start-up element for creation of sustainable energy system. The old approach of building of heating system used 20 years ago is outdated and can’t be seen as flexible and efficient when it comes to expansion of the system. Thus, many heating systems have big transportation losses, and high emissions while burning fossil fuels in large-scale central heating plants. Therefore the optimal decentralization degree and optimal location of generation small-scale units have to be defined based on wide analysis that considers a number of factors, such as ecologic and economic rationality, technology assurance, reliability, reasonable resource allocation, safety, development of city infrastructure and prognosis of energy demand. In particular, big energy district should be divided on several optimal clusters due to its density on heat demand, where each cluster will be satisfied with small-scale domestic distributed energy source. Here, clusters are groups of real customers - either commercial or residential buildings. When performing the clustering installation and annual operating costs are used as optimization criterion. To satisfy newly decentralized energy system will be used small-scale energy sources - sets of energy technologies that operate on renewable and non-traditional distributed energy sources available at the given district.

 

Several different ways of optimal clusters, energy flows between them and scenarios for their satisfaction are possible. That is why, to find the best solution from environmental, technological, territorial and economic points of view the decision-maker has to use multicriteria analysis. In total, these several stages result in complex algorithm of the creation of the integrated sustainable energy supply system, which is universal and could be used for any district with its own characteristics.