Optimal design of a hybrid energy plant by accounting for the cumulative energy demand

In this paper, the optimal design of a hybrid energy plant composed of a solar thermal collector, a photovoltaic panel, a combined heat and power system, an absorption chiller, an air source heat pump, a ground source heat pump and a thermal energy storage is studied. The size of each technology is optimized by applying a model implemented in Matlab® environment. The optimization goal is the minimization of the primary energy consumed throughout the life cycle of the hybrid energy plant by using a genetic algorithm. The primary energy consumed during the manufacturing phase of the hybrid energy plant is represented by the cumulative energy demand and is calculated by carrying out a cradle to gate life cycle assessment. The primary energy consumed during the operation phase is evaluated by simulating the system throughout one year. The cumulative energy demand of each system composing the hybrid energy plant is calculated as a function of the technology size. Therefore, the problem of life cycle assessment scaling of renewable and non-renewable energy systems is also taken into account in this paper. A tower located in the north of Italy is selected as a case study and two different approaches are evaluated. The first approach consists of solving the sizing optimization problem by minimizing the primary energy consumption only during the operation phase, while in the second approach the primary energy consumption is minimized throughout the life cycle of the plant by integrating the life cycle assessment into the optimization process. The results show that, if life cycle assessment is accounted for, the optimal hybrid energy plant configuration is different and a higher primary energy saving (approximately 12%) is achieved.