Decision Support for the Planning of Production Systems for Renewable Resources

Abstract

For the substitution of fossil fuels with renewables, the use of biomass in production processes is often considered ambivalent regarding economic viability and other sustainability criteria. To address the sustainability and efficiency concerns associated with biomass conversion, concepts for multi-input and multi-output biorefineries have been discussed and tested. However, lacking economic viability, none have been realized on an industrial scale until today. Instead, biogas plants, mostly used for combined heat and power generation, have become the most prevalent biomass conversion process in Germany. Incentivized by feed-in tariffs and other subsidies, almost 10,000 biogas plants operate in Germany in 2019. These and other biomass-fueled plants can produce power flexibly, but at higher cost than most other renewable and fossil power plants. In order to make sound decisions for production systems for renewable resources, comprehensive decision support is needed. The choices of capacity, configuration and location are among the major challenges for the planning of such production systems. This habilitation elaborates decision support by considering relevant strategic and operational aspects of production systems for renewable resources. The covered strategic aspects concentrate on the interdependent choices of plant capacity, configuration and location, which are addressed with nonlinear programming and geographic information systems. For plants for the conversion of biomass, large plant capacities lead to both economies of scale and rising specific transportation cost, which plays a major role for their economic viability. The operational aspect of scheduling flexible and programmable power generation and consumption is investigated as well because of its rising importance due to the increasing share of intermittent power generation from photovoltaic cells and wind turbines. Optimization models, application programming interfaces and available data sources are combined to offer the aspired decision support.