{"id":3621,"date":"2023-08-02T00:12:57","date_gmt":"2023-08-01T22:12:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wpethzprd.ethz.ch\/energy\/?p=3621"},"modified":"2025-03-27T16:14:05","modified_gmt":"2025-03-27T15:14:05","slug":"multi-energy-systems","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ethz.ch\/energy\/multi-energy-systems\/","title":{"rendered":"The search for clean flexible power: what can low-carbon multi-energy systems offer?"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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By Arvind Srinivasan<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
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Arvind<\/a> is\u00a0 a PhD candidate at the Laboratory of Reliability & Risk Engineering at ETH Zurich. His research investigates optimal sector-coupled energy system designs at the distributed scale with a focus on the security of supply.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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The integration of renewable energies increases the need for flexible power to be able to always match supply and demand. One source of clean flexible power could be coming from the end-users as the systems at local scale transition to low-carbon multi-energy systems.\u00a0 The flexibility potential of multi-energy systems for balancing services can be quantified by integrating the rules and rewards governing flexibility in energy system models.\u00a0 It aids the end-users to meet their energy economically and the transmission system operators to drive regulation designs that could maximize flexibility from end-users.<\/h3>

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The energy transition is reshaping how end users meet their energy needs.<\/strong><\/h3>

Increasing deployment of rooftop solar photovoltaics and battery storage solutions are making end-users such as households and firms active participants in meeting renewable targets and fighting climate change. By one estimate, half of Europe\u2019s citizens could be producing up to half of the EU\u2019s renewable energy<\/a> by 2050. Further, electricity is becoming central to all our energy needs as more of the heating and mobility demand is being met by heat pumps<\/a> and electric vehicles<\/a>, respectively. In other words, state-of-art passive systems are reshaping into sector-coupled and active \u201cmulti-energy systems\u201d such as shown in Figure 1.<\/p>

Multi-energy systems provide operational flexibility by providing multiple energy pathways to meet end user demand. Flexibility is the ability of an energy system to always match supply and demand<\/a> and a service highly valued in future energy systems: the IEA estimates that the need for flexibility is going to quadruple by 2050<\/a>. Without adequate flexibility, the variability in renewable supply could lead to frequency instability<\/a> and consequently, potential blackouts.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Figure 1<\/strong>: Energy transition goals are reshaping how end users meet their energy needs- moving away from passive systems (top) towards sector-coupled and active multi-energy systems (bottom). With multiple pathways for energy to flow, multi-energy systems offer high operational flexibility. <\/em><\/p><\/div>

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Considering flexibility in the future system planning could help end-users reduce their energy bills and maximize the potential of offering flexible supply.<\/strong><\/h3>

The security of the electricity transmission grid can be enhanced by harnessing the flexibility from future multi-energy communities via offering firm reserves in balancing markets.\u00a0 However, there are trade-offs to offering such flexibility to the transmission grid. Generation capacity offered as firm reserves for flexibility is not available for use for anything else for a set delivery period<\/a>. Flexibility must be provided immediately on imbalance in the grid<\/a> and therefore, these reserves need to be always available within the grid network ready to be dispatched whenever needed. The owners of the reserves, like the end-users, are compensated for reserve availability for a set delivery period with prices determined through market auctio<\/a>ns<\/a>. As an alternative to reserving capacities, the system components could have been turned off, thereby saving fuel costs, or the reserve capacity could have been utilized to sell excess electricity using a feed-in schem<\/a>e<\/a>. Further, from the system design perspective, components within the system could be sized sufficiently to meet daily energy needs alone, leaving no room for flexibility services. Planning for flexibility simultaneously with other decision characteristics could ensure optimal system utilization while also transitioning to a low carbon system.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Balancing the trade-offs by optimizing for system costs can address whether offering flexibility via balancing services is indeed economical for the end-user. <\/strong><\/h3>

Our optimization framework<\/a> attempts to find the optimal balance among the trade-offs and aid end-users to decide upon an ideal local system design. With an objective to minimize costs, the framework decides the optimal size of system technologies, operation strategies, and flexibility potential given the compensation mechanisms available from the balancing market. The advantages of the framework are in supporting better decision making for: (1) end-users to invest in clean technologies that minimize their costs, and (2) transmission system operators to estimate the flexibility potential from end-users and the effectiveness of the regulations and compensation mechanisms in place.<\/p>

As an application, we consider the case of a small Swiss neighborhood aiming to achieve an 80% reduction in emissions from the present day on their electricity and heating consumption, by shifting to rooftop photovoltaics, stationary battery systems and heat pumps. Historical prices of two balancing services are considered as compensation \u2013 primary control reserves (PCR) and secondary control reserves (SCR) with delivery periods of 4 hours and 1 week, respectively, which are representative of the ancillary services market framework in Switzerland<\/a>.<\/p>

We consider three scenarios for designing future multi-energy systems and estimating their flexibility potential:<\/p>