(62e) Simultaneous Design and Operation of Renewable Energy Carrier Production

A promising way to reduce humanity's dependency on fossil fuels is to increase the penetration of renewable resources such as solar and wind in the energy mixture and valuable chemicals production [1,2]. The challenging barrier to greater integration of renewable energies such as solar and wind is their intermittency and distribution. Solar irradiation and wind speeds fluctuate hourly, daily, seasonally, and geographically. Moreover, solar and wind availabilities are often asynchronous with consumer energy demands [3]. Energy storage is a promising way to reestablish the balance between supply and demand. Pumped hydro and compressed air energy storage technologies are mature technologies that are able to store energy in GWh scales. However, use of these technologies are limited to the certain geographical conditions [4]. While batteries offer higher efficiency, they suffer from low volumetric energy storage density and high capital investment cost. As an alternative, converting renewables into energy carriers that can efficiently store and also transport the energy can create an economically attractive sustainable energy supply chain [5,6].

With this study, we propose a simultaneous design and operation strategy for relating short-term decisions like scheduling and unit commitment to long-term decisions like design and synthesis [7-9]. In order to consider the dynamics of the intermittent resource availability and variation, temporal domain is hourly discretized and connected through inventory constraints in a multi-period formulation. In order to reduce the size of the resulting mixed-integer linear program, representative days based on time clustering are selected and cycled to constitute annual operation. Computational studies are done on comparison of energy carrier production from solar and wind resources in a high intensity region (Texas) and shipment to a low intensity region (New York) versus local energy production and battery storage in a low intensity region (New York). These cases are compared both individually and together in a multi-site production problem.

References

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