The DECARBONISLE project proposal, submitted to the H2020-LC-SC3-ES-8-2019 call, aimed at establishing a new body to support the islands in their energy transitions: the EIF (European Islands Facility). The EIF's mission would have been to engage with islands and provide them with all the required support to facilitate their energy transition thanks to highly qualified experts, modelling and planning tools, financial resources, technical support, legal and legislative guidance.
Given the restricted budget and the impossibility to involve the whole consortium of the H2020 proposal, the present one will tackle only some of the original project Specific Objectives. Aware of the problems related to planning and funding energy transition projects, the proposing team will combine its members' expertise in the energy sector with their business views to make sure to develop a tool able to provide financially highly-attractive projects to the islands, raising the interest of many potential investors. Specific tools and documents will be produced during the project, gathering the best practices and new solutions for a successful energy transition.
Particularly, it will analyse the worldwide best practices and success stories about the development of high RES penetration in island energy systems. The project will develop a user-friendly simulation and prioritization energy tool for the analysis of integrated, multi-sectorial and multi-service energy systems. It will serve as a prioritization tool for identifying the most cost-efficient solutions for increasing the RES share, reducing emissions and leading the islands to self-sufficiency. It will be based on a multi-objective optimisation analysis that will consider energy, economy, environment and society as optimisation objectives. The tool will then be applied on different case studies to test its validity. The output will be used to draft preliminary energy transition plans for the analysed islands.
The technical innovation of the research lies in the development of an innovative, user-friendly, simulation and prioritization tool for energy planning tailored to small island context. Moreover, the progress beyond the state of the art consists in developing a best practice report, a simulation and prioritization tool tailored to the local authorities in order to raise their awareness and understanding of issues and concepts for a wise, holistic and optimal energy planning.
Currently, several energy modelling software exist and can be used for analysing hybrid energy systems at different scales.
There are three main characteristics that need to be considered:
- scale;
- ability to run optimization analysis;
- ability to analyse several energy sectors.
Most of the tools tailored to energy systems with a scale similar to the one of small islands (10000 inhabitants) focus on the electric grid thus neglecting other energy sectors: an example of this is the HOMER software. HOMER (Hybrid Optimization of Multiple Energy Resources) is the most used software for HySys analysis and optimisation analysis but it does not allow the analysis of the thermal sector, transport and production of desalinated water. Furthermore, it enables the user to run only economic optimisation.
On the other hand, there are different optimisation software tailored to the analysis of integrated, multi-sector energy systems such as PRIMES (energy-economy model capturing energy demand and supply by sector and fuel and their interactions), TIMES (developed and used by the International Energy Agency), GEM-E3 (macro-economic model, widely used by the European Commission). Those tools are all tailored to International and/or National scale.
Another software that use a cross-sectorial approach is EnergyPLAN, are designed for energy planning at city, regional or national scale but they are not suitable for small scale energy system analysis and do not provide optimisation analysis.
Thus, it can be concluded that a software tailored to island needs and scale, able to consider the synergies of different energy sectors and is able to perform multi-objective optimisation analysis is not existent in the market. Thus, the proposed simulation and prioritization tool represents an added value and an innovation to the current state of the art.
The other "innovative" approach lies in the choice of the target group and in the will of tailoring each output to the specific target group. The present project main target group are the small island local authorities thus each task of the project will be tailored to their request and interest. In order to reach this objective, the research team will be supported and suggested by the external experts and the stakeholders (through ANCIM). The best practices report as well as the simulation and prioritization tool will be as user-friendly as possible in order to make them understandable and profitable to users that do not have high-technical skills. This concept will enable the users, e.g. local administration technical employees or general local public, to approach the energy topic of their own island to get a better understanding of the issue raising their awareness and lighting their passion to be a part of a holistically planned transition towards a secure, low-carbon, energy efficient, economically viable and socially fair energy transition.