Integration of sustainable Multi-Energy-hub Systems at neighbourhood scale (IMES)

The long-term vision of the Swiss “Energy Strategy 2050” is the phase-out of nuclear power plants along with a reduction in greenhouse-emissions. This leads to the following challenges:

• handling the transient nature of both loads and (renewable) energy generation,
• maintaining system stability,
  
• integrating decentralized energy production,
  
• reducing the daily/seasonal load and generation imbalances.
  

A promising solution addressing these concerns is the decentralized power production based on renewables and natural gas coupled with energy storage. With the research project "Integration of Sustainable Multi-Energy-Hub Systems at Neighbourhood Scale (IMES)", a comprehensive simulation approach for decentralized power production was developed and provided.

This project tackled at the same time technical, economic and social issues. It established a new methodology to evaluate decentralized power production solutions and formulate techno-economic decision guidelines for implementation of decentralized power production integrating renewable energy sources, natural gas-based micro-cogeneration and storage (power-to-gas and batteries).

The guidelines contain recommendations on how neighborhood-scale power productions should optimally be implemented today and in the future, which are the technical, economic and social barriers to be overtaken and where innovation is necessary to bring distributed power generation to the market.

Bringing together all the required expertise, from the thermodynamic to the economic and social point of view, this project permitted to clearly assess the potential role of decentralized multi-energy systems for future power generation.