Energy systems engineering - a guided tour

Abstract

As future energy systems aim to be more efficient, cost-effective, environmentally benign, and interconnected with each other, their design and operation become ever challenging tasks for decision-makers, engineers, and scientists. Sustainability of life on earth will be heavily affected by the improvements of these complex energy systems. Therefore, experts from various fields need to come together to find common solution strategies. However, since different technologies are usually developed separately by their own technical community, a generally accepted unified systematic approach to tackle integrated systems is lacking. With this article, we want to introduce and highlight the power of energy systems engineering as a generic framework to arrive at synergistic solutions to complex energy and environmental problems. Tools of energy systems engineering are numerous, and its application areas cover a wide range of energy systems. In this commentary, we present an overview of state-of-the-art methodologies of energy systems engineering, list its applications and describe few examples in detail, and finally introduce some possible new directions.

The energy Extended Resource Task Network, a general formalism for the modeling of production systems:Application to waste heat valorization

“…From this article, it is clear that our contribution arises on PSE field, namely between plant and supply chain levels and between operational and tactical levels of decision. Finally, the article of Demirhan et al [ 6] is in the form of roadmap rather than a classical review paper. lt points out 5 key methodologies of energy systems engineering: the design, the operation, the data analysis, the multi objective opti mization and the uncertainty consideration.…”

The Need for Accelerating the Transformation Process Towards a Defossilized Building Sector: Introduction of Building Energy, Material, and Social Systems Engineering (BEMSSE)

“…Process Systems Engineering (PSE) fulfills this requirement as it addresses the inherent complexity of systems (Klatt and Marquardt, 2009). Even though PSE is mainly used for chemical engineering on an industrial scale, its scope is also recommended for different fields, including energy systems or infrastructure systems (Demirhan et al, 2019;Stephanopoulos and Reklaitis, 2011;Klatt and Marquardt, 2009). However, a consequent application to the building sector and its materials is not stated in the literature so far.…”

COMANDO: A Next-Generation Open-Source Framework for Energy Systems Optimization

“…To ensure optimal economic and ecologic performance, it is common to cast these decision processes into mathematical optimization problems (e.g. Papoulias and Grossmann, 1983;Ghobeity and Mitsos, 2012;Gunasekaran et al, 2014;Andiappan, 2017;Frangopoulos, 2018;Demirhan et al, 2019;Sass et al, 2020). This is typically done via general purpose algebraic modeling languages (AMLs), e.g., GAMS (Bussieck and Meeraus, 2004) or Pyomo (Hart et al, 2011), or via specialized energy system modeling frameworks (ESMFs), e.g., OSeMOSYS (Howells et al, 2011) or oemof (Hilpert et al, 2018).…”