• Energy Research

Economic support policies are widely adopted in European countries in order to promote a more efficient energy usage and the growth of renewable energy technologies. On one hand these schemes allow us to reduce the overall pollutant emissions and the total cost from the point of view of the energy systems, but on the other hand their social impact in terms of economic investment needs to be evaluated. The aim of this paper is to compare the social cost of the application of each incentive with the correspondent CO2 emission reduction and overall energy saving. A Mixed Integer Linear Programming optimization procedure is used to evaluate the effect of different economic support policies on the optimal configuration and operation of a distributed energy supply system of an industrial area located in the north-east of Italy. The minimized objective function is the total annual cost for owning, operating and maintaining the whole energy system. The expectation is that a proper mix of renewable energy technologies and cogeneration systems will be included in the optimal solution, depending on the amount and nature of the supporting policies, highlighting the incentives that promote a real environmental benefit.

The present paper is a review of several papers from the Proceedings of the Joint European Thermodynamics Conference, held in Brescia, Italy, 1–5 July 2013, namely papers introduced by their authors at Panel I of the conference. Panel I was devoted to applications of the Second Law of Thermodynamics to social issues—economics, ecology, sustainability, and energy policy. The concept called Available Energy which goes back to mid-nineteenth century work of Kelvin, Rankine, Maxwell and Gibbs, is relevant to all of the papers. Various names have been applied to the concept when interactions between the system of interest and an environment are involved. Today, the name exergy is generally accepted. The scope of the papers being reviewed is wide and they complement one another well.

The paper deals with the modelization and optimization of an integrated multi-component energy system. On-off operation and presence-absence of components must be described by means of binary decision variables, besides equality and inequality constraints; furthermore, the synthesis and the operation of the energy system should be optimized at the same time. In this paper a hierarchical optimization strategy is used, adopting a genetic algorithm in the higher optimization level, to choose the main binary decision variables, whilst a MILP algorithm is used in the lower level, to choose the optimal operation of the system and to supply the merit function to the genetic algorithm. The method is then applied to a distributed generation system, which has to be designed for a set of users located in the center of a small town in the North-East of Italy. The results show the advantage of distributed cogeneration, when the optimal synthesis and operation of the whole system are adopted, and significant reduction in the computing time by using the proposed two-level optimization procedure.

In recent years, ship builders and owners have to face a great effort to develop new design and management methodologies that lead to a reduction in consumption and emissions during the operation of the fleet. In the present study, the optimization of an on-board energy system of a large cruise ship is performed, both in terms of energy and of the overall dimensions of the system, while respecting the environmental constraint. In the simulation, a variable number of identical Organic Rankine Cycle (ORC)/Stirling units is considered as an energy recovery system, bottoming the main internal combustion engines, possibly integrating with the installation of photovoltaic panels, solar thermal collectors, absorption refrigeration machines and thermal storages. The optimization takes into account the effective optimal management of the energy system, which is different according to the different design choices of the energy recovery system. Two typical cruises are considered (summer and winter). To reduce the computational effort for the solution of the problem, a bi-level strategy has been developed, which prescribes managing the binary choice variables expressing the existence or not of the components by means of an evolutionary algorithm, while all the remaining choice variables are obtained by a mixed-integer linear programming model of the system (MILP) algorithm. The entire procedure can be defined within the commercial software modeFRONTIER®.

The paper deals with the optimization of an advanced energy supply systems for two dwellings: a standard home and an advanced domotic home, where some demand side energy saving strategies have been implemented. In both cases the optimal synthesis, design and operation of the whole energy supply system have been obtained and a sensitivity analysis has been performed, by introducing different economic constraints. The optimization model is based on a Mixed Integer Linear Program (MILP) and includes different kinds of small-scale cogenerators, geothermal heat pumps, boilers, heat storages, solar thermal and photovoltaic panels. In addition, absorption machines, supplied with cogenerated heat, can be used instead of conventional electrical chiller to face the cooling demand. The aim of the analysis is to address the question if advanced demand strategies and supply strategies have to be regarded as alternatives, or if they have to be simultaneously applied, in order to obtain the maximum energy and economic benefit.

The paper introduces the Thermoeconomic Environment as a consistent ultimate boundary of the exergy cost accounting, where various exergy reservoir, of limited content, are immersed in the zero-exergy matrix, but they keep separated from it because of some confinement constraint. Starting from this very simple, but meaningful frame, the following issues are reviewed and commented, highlighting limitations and some possible new perspective: the exergy cost of mineral resources, the exergy cost of the products of biological systems, the exergy evaluation of capital and human work, the exergy evaluation of polluting emissions.

The paper presents the results of a research regarding the application of cogeneration plants, based on Organic Rankine Cycle (ORC), fed with wood residuals. In the first part of the paper an energy audit of the companies in a furniture industry district, located in the North-East of Italy, is presented. On the basis of these data a typical electricity/thermal demand profile dependent on the number of employees has been determined. In order to evaluate the potential savings achievable with an ORC cogeneration plant, a numerical simulation model has been developed to analyse the energy balances of the components as well as the whole ORC power plant performance. The effects on the system energy and exergy efficiencies of different binary and ternary mixtures of polisiloxane as working fluid and of different operating modes (cogeneration or pure electricity production) have been analysed, also in off-design conditions.