Print Email Facebook Twitter Traversing obstacles Title Traversing obstacles: Designing energy infrastructure networks in a geographical cost-differentiated context Author van den Assum, Joost (TU Delft Technology, Policy and Management) Contributor Heijnen, P.W. (mentor) Correljé, A. (mentor) Degree granting institution Delft University of Technology Programme Complex Systems Engineering and Management (CoSEM) Date 2022-08-24 Abstract The decarbonization of economies around the world is crucial for reducing the impact of human-induced climate change. Many proposed means to achieve this decarbonization like the electrification of various sectors or the introduction of ‘new’ forms of energy such as hydrogen and carbon capture and storage require existing energy infrastructures to be expended or entirely new energy infrastructures to be created. Since energy networks are capital intensive, minimizing their construction costs is essential for their realization. Previous works studying the cost minimization of energy networks often neglect that their construction costs can be influenced by geographical areas such as mountain ranges, existing infrastructures or zoning rules. Using methods borrowed from graph theory and geometrical computing, a method has been developed that is able to find costoptimal energy infrastructures in a spatial context of geographic regions with different costs for constructing power cables or pipelines through them. The method models these geographical areas as triangles on which borders a user-defined number of points are uniformly placed representing potential entry and exit points for pipelines or power cables. Experimenting with 144 randomly generated routing problems has shown that, on average, increasing the number of these placed border points results in a reduction of the total network costs. Although, this effect flattens when more than 7 of these points are placed. The method is applied to two offshore electricity networks in the Dutch North sea. These cases demonstrate the method’s strength in identifying trade-offs between energy networks’ investment costs and their (negative) influence on their spatial surroundings. Additionally, the method’s outcomes are well-suited to be used as a springboard for dialogue in energy infrastructure decision-making processes. Further research could focus on the extension of the model, by including existing connections, or the improvement of the model, by implementing a different method for modelling geographical areas that has a higher accuracy and is computationally faster. Subject Energy infrastructureGraph theoryOffshore WindPolicyModelling To reference this document use: http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:512431bf-13f5-4c6d-808a-8c961b780d48 Part of collection Student theses Document type master thesis Rights © 2022 Joost van den Assum Files PDF Master_Thesis_J_C_van_den ... 460537.pdf 17.2 MB Close viewer /islandora/object/uuid:512431bf-13f5-4c6d-808a-8c961b780d48/datastream/OBJ/view