Keynote speakers
Economic Value from Multi-Energy Infrastructure Integration
Abstract
The Smart Grid is seen as a key concept in the context of delivering a sustainable electricity system at an affordable cost. However, moving towards a low carbon future and meeting challenging environmental targets that have been set out worldwide call for rethinking the entire energy system and not only the electrical one. This relates in particular to decarbonising heating and cooling as well as the transport sector, while taking into account the interactions with various fuel chains (and in particular natural gas). In fact, heating, cooling and transport represent major contributions to energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions particularly in urban areas. On the other hand, there is significant room for increasing the energy system economic and environmental performance, from both operation and planning perspectives, by integrating historically de-coupled energy sectors, thus also paving the way to the development of Smart Communities and Smart Cities. Such multi-energy system thinking allows unlocking value somehow hidden when considering only electricity and accessing new forms of flexibility that may be essential in future networks. However, significant challenges arise in terms of modelling and assessment techniques that can cater for the high dimensionality of the problem and the relevant uncertainties associated to short-term (operational) and long-term (planning) optimization.
On these premises, the aim of this talk is to discuss a general Smart Multi-energy Grid framework beyond the electricity-only paradigm, and to present the research activities that are going on at the University of Manchester in the area of environomic optimization of integrated infrastructures, Smart Communities, and Smart Cities in the presence of small-scale (operational) and large-scale (planning) uncertainties.
Biography
Pierluigi Mancarella is a Lecturer in Future Energy Networks in the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at The University of Manchester, UK. He received his MSc and PhD degrees from the Politecnico di Torino, Italy, in 2002 and 2006, respectively, and was a visiting researcher at NTNU in Trondheim, Norway, in 2004, a post-doc research fellow at the Politecnico di Torino in 2006 and 2007, and a senior researcher at Imperial College London, UK, from 2008 to 2011. He then joined the Electrical Energy and Power Systems group at the University of Manchester, where he currently teaches “Power System Operation and Economics” and “Smart Grids and Sustainable Electricity Systems”.
Pierluigi’s areas of expertise and interests include techno-economic and environmental modelling of multi-energy systems, integration of distributed energy resources into power systems and distribution networks, operation and planning of integrated energy infrastructure under uncertainty, and business models for smart technologies. He is involved in and leads a number of research projects in the areas of sustainable development of smart energy systems and infrastructure planning under uncertainty, sponsored by the UK Research Council, the European Commission, and various industrial companies. Pierluigi is author of two books, five book chapters, and more than 70 research papers.
