A new container terminal is being built at the Duisburg inland port, making it the largest inland port in the European hinterland. The crane systems have been designed to enable purely electric operation, eliminating the need for trucks to move containers.
The enerPort II research project aims to test the climate-neutral operation of the entire port terminal by generating a large proportion of the necessary energy with a PV system and storing it temporarily in a battery storage facility. In addition, electricity is generated locally using CHP units and fuel cells powered by hydrogen.
enerPort II: Optimized energy use in the port
Consolinno was developed by Westenergie Netzservice GmbH to supply the energy management system for optimized plant operation. To this end, we relied on our flexibility agent FlexA.
FlexA uses AI to generate forecasts for the energy consumption of the port terminal's facilities based on historical data. FlexA also contains a digital twin of the entire energy system.
This model, along with forecasts for PV generation and energy consumption, is incorporated into a cyclical process in which linear optimization is used to create schedules for energy-generating plants.
Forecast-based optimization and schedules.
These schedules are read by a locally installed controller (PLC) from the FlexA cloud server and serve as a reference variable for plant control. However, the controller can respond to short-term deviations in actual consumption or generation compared to forecasts and deviate from the schedules at short notice in accordance with locally implemented logic.
The go-live date for optimized operations is planned for Q4/2024.
Funding information: "enerPort II" is funded by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Protection as part of the "Hydrogen Technology Offensive." Reference number: 03EN3046B.