Mathematical Methods for the Optimization of a District Heating Network and Geothermal Energy Storage (MONES)
General Information
Project within the Federal Ministry of Education and Research's (BMBF) funding program “Mathematik für Innovationen”
Duration: 2022 to 2025
Cooperation Partners
- Prof. Dr. Nicole Bäuerle
- Prof. Dr. Ralf Wunderlich (Brandenburgische Technische Universität Cottbus-Senftenberg, cooperation coordinator)
- Prof. Dr. Gerd Wachsmuth (Brandenburgische Technische Universität Cottbus-Senftenberg)
Application Partners
Project Description
A full project description can be found here (Website of cooperation partner BTU).
A geothermal energy storage under a residential building
Sub-Project: Markov Decision Processes for the Optimal Control of a District Heating Network
Heat is currently still produced to a large extent by burning fossil fuels (oil, gas, coal) and leads to significant CO₂ emissions and to energy dependency on other countries. The energy transition and decarbonization as well as the design of sustainable energy systems can only succeed if not only electricity production but also heat supply is converted. In the KIT sub-project, the focus is on the macroscopic view of district heating networks. The advantage of decentralized buffer storage is evaluated, economies of scale through the network size are analyzed and proposals are made for the pricing of heat quantity procurement and generation, which entail network control that produces as few CO₂ emissions as possible. In order to provide well-founded answers to the questions raised, the project is to carry out mathematical modeling and the development of digital twins of the energy systems mentioned, and the stochastic control problems are to be solved using methods from Markov Decision Processes and reinforcement learning.
A cold district heating network with geothermal energy storage