Overview
Sustainable energy deployment within an existing transport network needs timely coordination of all stakeholders, including energy production capacity, storage, bunkering logistics in harbours, and ships as end-users.
The EU-funded NEEDS project (NEw sustainablE fuel Deployment Scenarios for the European waterborne community) will develop a dynamic techno-economic to assess different scenarios at regional level. The project proposes a framework and methodology to simulate maritime or inland regions, containing regional facts on the transport network, hindcast data of environmental conditions, regional energy production needs.
Scenarios will allow to identify bottlenecks and needs to make such transition a success. The model will support the EU, the regional waterborne community, and the harbours, offering an assessment of the most efficient pathways towards their energy transition on local and regional levels.
Deployment of sustainable energy within an existing transport network is a challenge which requires an independent and transparent analysis and overview. To be successful, it implies a timely coordination of all stakeholders, from energy production capacity, to storage & bunkering logistics in harbours and up to the end-users: the inland waterways and maritime transport, and waterborne activities.
A lot of information about each stakeholders, their characteristics in terms of technical readiness, emission level, actual transport capacity, costs, scalability and impact are available. Putting all parts of the puzzle together is the aim of the present study.
We are ready to apply existing scenario simulation techniques, containing among others regional information on transport network and hindcast data of weather conditions (for regional energy production), to simulate different scenarios of sustainable fuel deployment. Forcing certain variables as input into the model in order to study its impact on other quantities, will help evaluating the viability of certain scenarios or identify bottlenecks and best tactics to overcome them.
This dynamic techno-economic model will hopefully help the Commission, the member states, the regional waterborne community and the harbours evaluating the most efficient pathways towards their energy transition, for local to regional scale. The amount of details brought into the parameters of the model will allow to run such simulation from micro to macro scale. The model will primarily focus on variables and parameters related to the waterborne community. However, it will not be closed and will able a possible future inclusion of other sources of energy needs, if made available from land-based activity and transport, or aviation.