About this Research Topic
Climate change, prevalent energy crisis, and lack of access to resources, such as clean water, in many sub-Saharan African countries, and other third world countries at large, necessitate the need to investigate creative ways to develop and integrate robust and flexible resource networks. Currently, supply and value chains of different kinds of resource utilization have been developed and implemented independent of other resource value chains. Existing techniques for network synthesis and optimization have mostly been applied to micro-scale networks such as in process plants and single commodity supply chain networks. As an example, many countries in the world depend heavily on centralized electricity grids, which in most cases, are fossil and/or hydro based yet these networks are somewhat disconnected from their resource value chains. Although the techniques for utilizing these value chains have evolved over time, developing systematic ways of synthesizing and integrating these networks will go a long way in establishing holistic frameworks that can be used to meet key sustainable development goals notably SDG 9 and 11. Key resources such as fresh and wastewater, agricultural and other organic wastes, solar and wind energy, can all be harnessed and systematically distributed in a sustainable way to demand nodes. Such demand nodes can include farms for food production and energy for domestic and industrial uses. The ‘wastes’ from one node are then recycled for use in another node of the integrated network utilizing principles of circular economy.
Given a set of resources from which energy can be generated (animal/human waste, biomass, solar, wind, hydro, etc.) they are limited by their season/time of availability and location. This is compacted by the demand characteristics of the nodes where demand fluctuates at a specified time of day and season of the year. As well as, a set of energy conversion/resource processing technologies where each technology has a unit cost as well as transportation modes in the networks. A potential solution lies in developing methods for generating optimal resource/energy distribution/sharing network, that may be community or regional based, that satisfies resource/energy demand in the most cost effective, environmental and socially optimal ways. The developed methods should be flexible to allow for investigating ‘what if scenarios’ that can then be used by the government and other stakeholders to make critical decisions depending on the context at hand.
It is not enough to only identify the availability of potential renewable energy resources but to also investigate the possibility of heat/resource sharing among private, public buildings and industries, considering factors such as time dependency of demand and supply, while trying to minimize the cost involved in construction and maintenance, as well as environmental and social impact.
We welcome papers addressing the following topics but not limited to:
- Bioenergy supply chain network optimization
- Water network synthesis
- Integrated renewable energy and process heat network synthesis.
- Integrated industrial, residential and district heat network optimization.
- Integrated municipal and agricultural waste network optimization for regional energy supply.
- Integrated industrial park energy and waste network optimization.
- Heat storage network optimization.
Keywords: Supply chain network, optimization, integrated resource network, renewable energy, resource recycling
Important Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.
