Multicriteria Synthesis of Trigeneration Systems Assisted With Renewable Energy Sources and Thermal Energy Storage

The increasing world energy demand as a result of society development brings forth a growing environmental concern. The use of high-efficiency alternative systems is becoming progressively more interesting due to economic reasons and regional incentives. The issue of finding the best configuration that minimizes total annual cost is not enough anymore, as the environmental concern has become one of the objectives in the synthesis of energy systems. The minimization of costs is often contradictory to the minimization of environmental impact. Multi-objective optimization tackles the conflicting objectives issue by providing a set of trade-off solutions, or Pareto solutions, that can be examined by the decision maker in order to choose the best configuration for the given scenario. The present work proposes a mixed integer linear programming model for the synthesis of a trigeneration system that must attend the electricity, heat, and cooling demands of a multifamily building complex in Zaragoza, Spain. The objective functions to be minimized are the overall annual costs and the overall annual CO₂ emissions, considering investment, maintenance and operation costs. As a first approach, the single-objective configurations for each objective function are evaluated. Then, the Pareto frontier is obtained for the minimization of total annual costs and total annual CO₂ emissions, allowing to obtain the best trade-off configuration, which brings results close to the optimal single objectives. It is worth mentioning that the treatment of the energy prices was simplified in order to keep on the same level of detail as energy CO₂ emissions, which are given only on an annual basis. On the other hand, the optimization model developed can be further complicated in order to consider more complex situations.