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Designing Energy Supply Chains with the P-Graph Framework under Cost Constraints andSustainability Considerations
Citation:
Vance, L., I. Heckl, B. Bertok, H. Cabezas, AND F. Friedler. Designing Energy Supply Chains with the P-Graph Framework under Cost Constraints andSustainability Considerations. In Proceedings, European Symposium on Computer Aided Process Engineering, Budapest, HUNGARY, June 15 - 18, 2014. ELSEVIER, AMSTERDAM, Holland, 1-6, (2014).
Impact/Purpose:
The goal of this work is to design supply develop and demonstrate methods for designing energy supply chains that can meet society's needs as sustainably as possible.
Description:
A computer-aided methodology for designing sustainable supply chains is presented using the P-graph framework to develop supply chain structures which are analyzed using cost, the cost of producing electricity, and two sustainability metrics: ecological footprint and emergy. They respectively represent environmental burden in terms of land use and energy resources. The P-graph framework provides a mathematically rigorous procedure for synthesizing optimal and alternative networks subject to profitability considering ecological footprint and emergy inputs. Emergy is a measure of energy used up in transformations directly and indirectly to make a product or maintain a service, in our case energy production. Emergy and ecological footprint complement each other because they represent different aspects of sustainability. The proposed methodology is demonstrated with a supply chain for providing electric power and heat to an agricultural region with agricultural wastes which can be used as renewable resources. The results indicate that, compared to electricity from the grid and/or natural gas, renewable energy resources can yield cost reductions of up to 17% as well as ecological footprint and emergy reductions. This allows the design of more sustainable supply chains that are both cost-effective and less environmentally damaging.
