A Thermoeconomics-Based Approach to the Integrated Optimization of Design and Operation for Decentralised Energy Systems and Variable Load Conditions

The many comprehensive approaches formulated for the optimization of large industrial energy systems have been rarely applied to small and medium scale units, because of the difficulties in handling a continuously variable energy demand and of the lower margins for energy and emissions saving. Today, the growing interest for decentralised energy systems in the civil sector stimulates major efforts for the optimization of such plants, with a particular focus on the control system and on a management strategy able to exploit the opportunities existing in the free energy market. In this paper a methodology is proposed for the optimization of design and operation of variable demand systems supplying different non-storable products. In such systems, efficiency penalty due to off-design operation is usually assumed as a key issue; the proposed method, however, introduces an original and meaningful interpretation of the capital depreciation cost and keeps into account the possibility for grid connected power systems to produce surplus electricity to be sold. The proposed optimization process, based on the Lagrange multipliers method, assumes either an economic indicator (the Net Present Value, NPV or the Net Cash Flow, NCF) or a function depending only on fuel consumption (as usually proposed in literature) as objective function. Main advantages of the proposed method are the high level of integration between the optimization of design and operation and the possibility to automate the algorithm in order to drive a real-time optimized control system aiming to achieve the maximum profitability or the maximum primary energy saving.