Poly-generation planning: useful lessons from models and decision support tools

Increasing environmental concerns and the trends towards deregulation of energy markets have become an integral part of energy policy planning. Consequently, the requirement for environmentally sound energy production technologies has gained much ground in the energy business. The development of energy-efficient production technologies has experienced cogeneration and tri-generation and now is moving towards poly-generation.

All these aspects have added new dimension in energy planning. The liberalized energy market requires techniques for planning under uncertainty. The growing environmental awareness calls for explicit handling of the impacts of energy generation on environment. Advanced production technologies require more sophisticated models for planning.

The energy sector is one of the core application areas for operations research, decision sciences and intelligent techniques. The scientific community is addressing the analysis and planning of poly-generation systems with different approaches, taking into account technical, environment, economic and social issues.

This chapter presents a survey on the models and decision support tools for cogeneration, tri-generation and poly-generation planning. This survey tries to reflect the influence of deregulated energy market and environmental concerns on decision support tasks at utility level. Diverse modelling techniques and solution methods for planning problems will co-exist for a long time.

Undoubtedly, the application of intelligent techniques is one of the main trends.