Energy Production and Storage Optimal Sizing for Research Infrastructures: A Case Study at KARA Accelerator

Large research facilitates like particle accelerators have huge power consumption requirements leading to significant carbon footprint and high energy costs. In light of ongoing global effort to reduce energy related CO<inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</inf> emissions and rising energy costs, the Karlsruhe Research Accelerator (KARA) at KIT under Horizon Europe project Research Facility 2.0 will design and optimally size a local renewable based energy production system to ensure environmentally sustainable and economically viable energy generation for such facilities. The proposed energy production system, connected to public utility electric grid, constitutes of solar, wind and geothermal generators supported by battery energy storage. This study will provide a framework for sizing of a energy production system using a yearly KARA load profile such that optimal sizing is obtained as a result of single-objective optimization based on total system net present cost of the proposed system. Various different configurations of energy production system are compared and sizing results reveal that hybrid configuration where all the generators are integrated is the most cost effective. Moreover, the proposed methodology can also be adapted to other accelerator facilities, and the results can serve as a reference for the future design of accelerator facilities.