Research Projects

OptMix is a stand-alone software which has been developed by the project partners in order to determine the optimal renewable energy and storage mix at a given site. For the parameterization of the software a Graphical User Interface (GUI) was developed.

OptMix is implemented in two separated parts for the realization of preprocessing and optimization tasks:

Preprocessing part:

• Processing of files containing meteorological data and potential areas (wind, hydro, PV, biomass / biogas) for a given site which have been generated via meteorological data and geographic information system-Software (GIS) with postal codes / regional keys resolution
• Model based calculation of the hourly time series of renewable energy potentials for the selected site
• Estimation of the hourly load time series for different reference cases such as local community, default electricity provider and industrial facility for a given site
• Generation of different outputs in form of text or excel files, result window and signal visualization plots

Optimization part:

• Optimization of the energy and storage mix for economic (minimization of electricity generation costs) or ecological (minimization of CO₂ footprint) cases in on- or off grid use for a given degree of renewable energy supply
• Determination of optimal storage capacity and optimization of storage mix (li-ion, lead-acid, redox-flow, power to gas, hydrogen, compressed air)

Currently OptMix can be parameterized for state Hessen based on regional keys which give the user the possibility to simply define a specific area for the estimation of energy and load time series. The software structure of OptMix is modular and easily expandable to other federal states.