This report describes the work carried out during 2019 in relation to the activity of developing tools to support the integration of multi-energy systems. In its three-year development, such activity has the task of creating support tools for the modeling, analysis, and application phases, and is related to the H2020 MAGNITUDE project (No. 774309) of the European Community. The main result of the first year is the definition of a methodology for the modeling and analysis of multi-energy systems. This methodology is based on the concept of “energy network”, in which the energy balance is organized in graphs describing the interaction of the nodes, which represent the services provided outside the system (e.g., the dispatching services of the electricity system), the demand (e.g., the users of the multi-energy system), in both the satisfied and unsatisfied share, the generation, load, storage systems, and the energy losses of the production process. Each node is associated with the plane connected to the energy vector in which it operates – apart from the energy transformation nodes that link a pair of nodes belonging to different energy planes through a conversion factor. The energy/power flows of the system are represented by the connections (arrows) that link the various nodes together, in such a way as to obtain a graph of the activities and the energy transformation process.
The methodology thus defined is provided with operational tools that include a dynamic simulation environment and an operational programing environment. Dynamic simulation consists in reproducing the system behaviors along a time horizon, assigning commands to the controllable devices. In this work it has been exploited to validate the ability of specific multi-energy systems to satisfy the technical requirements set by dispatching services. This type of analysis is based on finite state machines extended with time treatment.
Operational programing supports energy resource management for the short and very short term; it is divided into a first phase, in which the commands of the multi-energy system are defined to satisfy the demand, and a second phase, in which an attempt is made to exploit the flexibility available in the program as a result of the first phase to provide dispatching services. In both phases the analysis is conducted taking into account the economic criteria of production cost, remuneration/cost of service provision, and demand remuneration. Energy resource management is based on extended mathematical programing with mixed integer variables. As application examples, the urban district heating system of Milan and a typical shopping center have been proposed.