Delivering Sustainable Energy Solutions to Ports

"Ports are major sources of greenhouse gas emissions as they have to move up to 10,000 containers a day from ship to road or rail transport and correspondingly in the reverse direction from land transport onto ships. The aim of the project is to identify sustainable energy solutions which enable ports to manage transient power flows and maintain power quality in a way that will substantially reduce primary energy demand and greenhouse gas emissions. The project will explore the potential of local energy storage to manage transient power flows inside the port and to identify and trial power management solutions to minimise demand from the grid or diesel generating sets. In particular the research at the University of Reading will focus on developing a model of the crane and the energy flow between cranes so that methods can be derived to optimise the power flow at local level (within a crane) and at the network level (within a set of cranes). The potential of short term storage to save energy and minimise power flows will also be explored.
The PhD student will be involved in describing the topology of the crane/flywheel network at Ports of Felixstowe and Valencia and will develop a Multiple Agent System for coordinating and managing power exchange across the network by using both the network model and the energy demand profile.
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