Modelling and simulating a thermal storage system for the Savona campus smart polygeneration micro grid

The present paper is addressed to a further development of the Energy Management System (EMS) which is implemented and running at the Smart Polygeneration Microgrid (SPM) at the Savona Campus of the University of Genova. The SPM thermal network is constituted by heat generation units (cogenerative gas turbines and gas boilers, overall thermal power about 1MWth) and a network of pipelines providing the heat to a series of buildings during the daily working hours. Being the electric power demand significantly present also at night, a heat storage system would be advisable for full cogeneration all day long. For this reason the existing EMS model and predictive control has been modified for taking into account the presence of a thermal storage system of suitable volume. The new operation scheme at simulation level also includes a biomass burner, to be switched on in priority with respect to the existing gas burners. The approach for modelling the heat storage, in terms mainly of storage energy content, allows the economic feasibility of the investment to be assessed when subhourly simulations of real operating conditions are performed with respect to recent historical time series of electric and heat load demand at the Savona Campus.