The sheer number of alternative technologies and measures make the optimal planning of energy system transformations highly complex, requiring decision support from mathematical optimisation models. Due to the high computational expenses of these models, only individual case studies are usually...

Geothermal plants have been increasingly constructed in recent years to exploit the high geothermal energy potential in Germany in district heating networks at the municipal level. In order to use this potential economically, municipal planners need instruments for designing the district heating...

The recent rapid expansion of renewable energy capacities in Germany has been dominated by decentralised wind, photovoltaic (PV) and bioenergy plants. The spatially disperse and partly unpredictable nature of these resources necessitates an increasing exploitation of integration measures such as...

An increasing number of municipalities are striving for energy autonomy. This study determines in which municipalities and at what additional cost energy autonomy is feasible for a case study of Germany. An existing municipal energy system optimization model is extended to include the personal...

Real‐world problems are becoming highly complex and therefore have to be solved with combinatorial optimization (CO) techniques. Motivated by the strong increase in publications on CO, 8393 articles from this research field are subjected to a bibliometric analysis. The corpus of literature is...

A cost-efficient and sustainable energy transition requires reliable information about the distribution of renewable energy resources. Here we draw on over 1.5 million scenicness ratings of around 200,000 geotagged photographs from Scenic-Or-Not to quantify the aesthetic value of the landscapes...

Research attention on decentralized autonomous energy systems has increased exponentially in the past three decades, as demonstrated by the absolute number of publications and the share of these studies in the corpus of energy system modelling literature. This paper shows the status quo and...

This paper analyses the current technical potential for utilising excess heat from German biogas plants, in order to supply local settlements through district heating. Based on a survey of around 600 biogas plant operators, the fractions of excess heat in these plants are analysed. A heuristic...

Currently, most photovoltaic (PV) modules are aligned in a way that maximizes the overall annual yields, which leads to significant peaks in electricity production and could threaten energy policy objectives such as security of supply as well as environmental sustainability. The exploitation of...

Ambitionierte europäische und nationale Zielvorgaben in der Energiepolitik führen in den letzten Jahren zu einem Umbruch der Energiewirtschaft, der vor allem durch den Ausbau von erneuerbaren Energien geprägt ist. Die Charakteristika dieser Energieträger bedingen, dass ihre Erschließung...