Be-Safe: Reliable design of industrial energy systems

Motivation: Resource / energy efficiency and climate protectio

In order to ensure a reliable energy supply, high safety margins are applied to the expected maximum loads when designing industrial energy supply systems, and individual systems are planned redundantly. A particularly high requirement applies to energy systems with heat demand (heating, cooling, steam), since the supply cannot be ensured by external sources such as the power grid. The resulting conservative design option is rarely efficient and leads to unnecessary costs and CO2 emissions. Nevertheless, it is applied in practice because suitable tools for individual and detailed planning are lacking or because such a planning process does not pay off, especially for medium-sized companies.

Goal of the project: Be-Safe

The objective is to develop methods for the optimal design of energy supply systems for industrial processes with high thermal loads based on uncertain input data and unpredictable plant failures. The methods will generate individually valid thermal load profiles for an energy system from small and incomplete data sets. Based on these load profiles, the methods can be used to evaluate and mathematically optimize the reliability of an energy system. During optimization, uncertainties in the expected requirements should be systematically taken into account. This also enables multi-criteria design with respect to supply reliability, costs and CO2 emissions. The methods enable planning companies, the energy system operators and plant constructors to evaluate the supply security of different variants and to estimate the additional costs. Thus, thermal energy systems can be designed in a supply-secure and efficient way and unnecessary CO2 emissions of up to 6 million tons can be avoided.