(48g) Self-Sufficient Power, Heat, and Fuels Production: A Pathway to Deep Decarbonization

With the urge to reduce global emissions, efforts must be made to decarbonize high-intensity sector. Specifically, energy and heat production is the highest global contributor (IEA, 2022). Its decarbonization drives the substitution of traditional fossil resources in favour of renewable alternatives. Overall, energy transition is expected to bring an unprecedent change in energy production. The high fluctuation of natural resources (wind and solar) represents an enormous challenge. Hence, a change of paradigm in the design and operation of facilities is expected where decentralized energy production may become a common practice (Chaudry et al., 2023). Additionally, renewable energy transportation may be not feasible in some situations. The absence of electricity transportation infrastructure is the main reason for that. At this point, isolated areas may be disconnected from the grid and produce its own energy from renewable energy sources. These self-sufficient installations must cover main utility demands. These include heat, power and cooling (Temiz and Dincer, 2023). Additionally, in-situ production of fuels may be desired to provide potential refuelling for light and heavy transport.

In this work, an isolated self-sufficient facility is proposed and studied including several energy production, storage and power-to-X conversion technologies. Three different energy demands have been considered: electricity, heat, and H₂ fuel. Wind and solar resources are considered for power generation with an hourly resolution. Short- and long-term storage are considered using batteries and Power-to-X technologies respectively. This last option considers hydrogen production as a promising solution. It is either stored using different physical storage technologies (compression, liquefaction) or further converted to other energy carriers (e.g., methanol, ammonia). These energy carriers may be eventually used to meet the heat and H₂ fuel demand. A holistic analysis is conducted to design and operate this integrated system. Several topics are assessed including total investment, emissions reduction potential, energy efficiency or area and volume requirements. The scale-up and down for equipment sizing and technologies selection is included. Hence, capacities covering from industrial to modular are considered (Sánchez and Martín, 2018). In addition, different locations have been analysed to determine the influence on the design and operation of the proposed self-sufficient facilities.

The results show how the technological combination allows to meet a given power, heat, and fuel demand using renewable resources as raw material in a self-sufficient scheme. The effect of the renewable resources availability and fluctuations has presented a major impact on the technical and economic performance of the facilities. Energy storage technologies are essential to meet the demand regardless of the fluctuating energy production systems. Moreover, these results are put in perspective with the possibility of using energy transportation through energy carriers to the final installation. Several demands, locations and distances are used for this purpose. Thus, these installations will be able to advance in a decarbonization and energy self-sufficiency that will allow to cover different energy demands.

Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge the project Convenio entre la Universidad de Salamanca e Ingeniería de Sistemas para la Defensa de España (ISDEFE) para la realización conjunta de actividades de I+D+I en materia de sostenibilidad y eficiencia energética en Defensa and the FPU, Spain grant (FPU21 /02413) to C.P.

References

International Energy Agency (IEA). CO2 Emissions in 2022. 2022.

Chaudry, M., Jayasuriya, L., Hall, J. W., Jenkins, N., Eyre, N., & Eggimann, S. (2023). Simulating flexibility, variability and decentralisation with an integrated energy system model for Great Britain. Scientific Reports, 13(1), 4772.

Temiz, M., and Dincer, I. (2023). Cleaner production of energy and fuels from a renewable energy-based self-sufficient system with energy storage options. Journal of Energy Storage, 72, 108415.

Sánchez, A., and Martín, M. (2018). Scale up and scale down issues of renewable ammonia plants: Towards modular design. Sustainable Production and Consumption, 16, 176-192.