CE4T develops optimisation tools for practice
- News
Over the past 3 years, in the project Clean Energy for Tourism (CE4T), a Living Lab has been working closely with cable cars from the Pinzgau/Salzburg region. The aim of the project is to identify flexible loads in ski resorts and to develop optimisation algorithms and tools that will identify optimal solutions on the following three levels:
- for the grid to avoid peak loads,
- for the electricity market to optimise costs and
- for reducing CO₂ emissions
In the last online workshop with the cable car providers, which took place on May 27, 2021, solutions developed in the project were discussed with the practice partners.
The online dashboard designed by AIT Austrian Institute of Technology and World Direct was presented, which visualises consumption and production figures from live energy monitoring, as well as forecasts, individually for the ski resorts and Salzburg AG.
BEST gave an overview on OptEnGrid, an optimisation tool that considers the regional environment conditions like e.g. regional availability of renewable energies and costs as well as CO₂-savings.
Moreover, the energy and operation optimisation platform developed by AIT were presented, with the help of which flexibilities can be made visible and ski resorts can be operated in the best possible way. At this point, different influencing factors such as CO₂ intensities for the purchase of electrical energy, prices of energy markets and the utilisation of the electricity grid can be considered. The following figure shows the optimised filling of a storage pond in which the optimiser determines the optimal switch-on times of the pumps.
During the workshop, a survey was also conducted, which showed that the close and continuous involvement of the cable car companies is a key to successful utilisation: the practice partners consistently see a very high potential in continuing the solutions developed in the research project even after the end of the project. The average score of the answers was 8.0 with a maximum of 10. (completely agree).