Energy Transport Networks

Admitting renewable production of electric power and gas has a massive impact on the operation of transport networks in electricity, gas and district hea-ting. A strongly fluctuating feed-in into medium and lower network levels requires increasingly communicative, model-based concepts for optimal control under uncertainties.

District heating networks, for instance, serve mainly to supply heat and hot water. However, a significant portion of the revenues is achieved by selling electricity from cogeneration of heat and power.

Taking into account the spacial and transient behavior of the district hea-ting network can help to use the network as large energy storage reacting the volatility on the electricity market and thus increase the profits of the company. However, optimizing the operating sequences of the heating plant requires that all its components be mapped as accurately as possible.

For the district heating network, this means that one must consider not only static states, but also its entire temporal dynamics. This is the only way to opti-mally operate the network as a component of the heating plant.

Irrespective of the type of energy (electricity, natural gas, district heating), there are recurrent mathematical problems in modeling, simulation, optimization and/or control.

Our competence in the field of energy networks covers the entire spectrum:

• Mathematical modeling
  
• Algorithm development
  
• Optimization and control
  
• Software implementation

Due to the size and complexity of the mathematical models, methods of model reduction have to be developed and applied in order to speed up the simulati-on and to enable a model-based control at all. This model reduction must be designed in such a way that the essential processes are still accurately re-produced.