Dr. Stephan Schnez

ABB Corporate Research (CH) & Product Group Microgrids and Distributed Generation (IT)

Monday, February 12, 2018, 14:00

Room 01-012, Georges-Köhler-Allee 102, Freiburg 79110, Germany

Historically, the energy system has been subdivided into rather disconnected systems for the different energy carriers and needs. This is about to change because of the energy transition. The process of fully integrating different energy carriers is known as sector coupling, with the goal to create a multi-energy system. Apart from economic and temporal considerations, a multi-energy system poses two conceptual challenges: (i) How do we operate such a complex system in a stable and cost-efficient way? (ii) How do we design a multi-energy system, i.e. what kind of energy conversion elements, what kind of storage etc. do we have to install and where?

In my presentation, I will present our approach to the latter challenge. In the first part, I will introduce our rather generic approach which allows to investigate a broad range of different multi-energy systems. In the second part, I will then show how this can be used to analyze two specific examples, namely a district heating and cooling network and the port-ship interaction for low-carbon cruise vessels.