The energy industry is experiencing a rapid transition driven by new technologies, growing energy needs, and ambitious policy goals. Electricity networks are becoming increasingly pervasive and smart, always in need of integrating intermittent renewable sources to cover an increasing demand. Gas networks are facing a significant change and renovation, addressing both the conversion towards hydrogen and a shift towards load electrification. Heating and cooling networks are increasing in number and efficiency, tightening local communities to energy awareness, promoting smart energy districts and pushing forward a generational jump in our common decarbonization path.
Furthermore, energy networks are becoming increasingly interlinked and interdependent. Gas-fired power plants, combined heat and power (CHP) facilities, or heat pumps are only some of the key technologies showing how network coupling is a central topic in energy system planning and management. Planning our energy future has never been more complex!
Deciding on infrastructure upgrades and investments in new assets is more difficult than ever. Managing an energy system exposed to higher variability in demand and supply, more fragmented and spatially distributed, poses a tremendous challenge. Traditional siloed teams and processes, relying on inconsistent data and incompatible tools, are inadequate for today’s needs. Achieving competing objectives like affordability, reliability, and sustainability is impossible when different parts of the system are planned in isolation.
Introducing SAInt, the “Scenario Analysis Interface for Energy Systems”, an integrated and user-friendly software modelling platform developed by encoord GmbH (https://encoord.com) that enables coordination across planning processes, helping systems planners and energy managers navigate the energy transition. SAInt executes optimization models for system expansion, operations, and markets, along with physical simulations of electric, gas, and thermal networks, all in one modelling environment with a single and consistent data structure. Thanks to the activities carried out in the HYPERGRYD project, which is supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 programme, SAInt has expanded its functionalities to model district heating networks physically and to perform combined and integrated simulations with electric or natural gas systems.
Utility planners and engineers can now integrate planning across electric generation, transmission, and distribution by seamlessly transitioning between balanced and unbalanced AC power flow simulations and production cost optimizations. SAInt also integrates electric and gas infrastructure planning. Engineers perform hydraulic simulations of gas pipeline networks with any gas composition, including hydrogen. And thermal-hydraulic simulations in SAInt allow utility planners to analyze heating and cooling networks, plan for expansions, or explore fluid temperature changes to migrate to the 5th generation of district heating, all in the same software.
With SAInt, developers quantify the economic value and risks of new projects by running capacity expansion and production cost optimizations. In the same modelling platform, they can also assess infrastructure impacts through physical simulations leveraging mathematically rigorous formulations of energy transport problems and industry-standard numerical simulation methodologies.
SAInt allows utilities to educate themselves and their regulators on the costs and benefits of electrification, distributed energy resources, and new technologies. SAInt is an invaluable tool for developers seeking customers or investors. It provides rigorous modelling to justify the value and risks of new projects. SAInt’s flexible and intuitive interface fosters collaboration between engineers, aligning different planning objectives and transforming energy planning.
Learn more about SAInt and request a trial at https://encoord.com.
