Expansion decisions are often made based on gut feeling rather than data. This causes synergies between energy carriers and technologies to be overlooked – leaving significant savings potential untapped.
Minimize Capex
The Designer enables optimal sizing and timing of investments through simultaneous optimization of all components. This way you avoid oversizing and don't miss any synergies.
Minimize Long-term Opex
Leverage market volatility to your advantage and strategically expand flexibility. The multi-year analysis considers future price developments and unlocks revenue potential through flexible operation.
Cost-effectively Reduce Emissions
Integrate your CO2 targets as constraints and find the most cost-effective path to climate neutrality. Pareto analyses show you the trade-off between costs and emissions.
Used by industry leaders
The Building Blocks of the Designer
The Designer systematically analyzes the entire solution space and progressively narrows it down to the optimal investment decision.
Request DemoThe Designer optimizes simultaneously across all energy carriers: electricity, gas, heat, cold, and steam. It identifies cross-carrier synergies such as waste heat utilization between different energy carriers.
The Designer optimizes investment timing over a horizon of 10 to 20 years. It considers asset lifecycles and market developments and identifies when each technology should be built.
The Designer automatically sizes plants by size and capacity. It compares different technology options such as heat pumps, e-boilers, or gas boilers and conducts a trade-off analysis between Capex and Opex.
The Designer integrates spot, day-ahead, and intraday markets into the optimization. It considers PPAs, futures, and balancing energy and uses flexibility marketing as an additional revenue source.
The Designer offers multi-site capability for portfolio optimization. It aggregates locations for overarching strategies and uses temporal compression for efficient long-term calculations.
The Designer fully models grid connections and internal networks. It considers capacity limits and bottlenecks and maps self-supply as well as direct lines.
The Designer calculates scenarios for grid capacity expansions including costs per MW. It integrates CO2 budgets as optimization constraints and maps Scope 1 and 2 emissions for ESG compliance.
FAQ
Answers to the most important questions about strategic investment planning with the Designer.
More Questions?The Designer analyzes the entire solution space with all possible combinations of technologies, timings, and sizes. Through mathematical optimization, this is systematically narrowed down to the cost-optimal solution – like a funnel narrowing from top to bottom.
Yes, the same algorithm optimizes both investment decisions (Capex) and operational performance (Opex). The optimal plant design already considers future operating costs, unlocking the full savings potential.
The Designer handles strategic long-term planning (years) and investment decisions: What should be built? The Operator manages operational short-term planning (hours/days) and dispatch optimization: How should it be operated? Both use the same energy model (Digital Twin).
RIZM uses baseline data for Capex and Opex that can be customized per customer. You can model costs as fixed euro values, euros per MW, or euros per MWh. Annualization is done over selectable time periods and interest rates.
Yes, you can set CO2 budgets as constraints. The algorithm then finds the cost-optimal path within your CO2 budget. Pareto fronts show you the trade-off between costs and emissions, enabling you to make informed decisions.
The analysis typically covers 10 to 20 years and considers asset lifecycles as well as replacement investments. The Designer also models dynamic market price developments and regulatory changes to enable robust investment decisions.
We recommend first developing a cost-optimal scenario. Then you conduct sensitivity analyses for prices, CO2 costs, and investment limits. This allows you to compare different roadmaps with varying assumptions.
Yes, using the infrastructure expansion parameter, costs per MW for grid expansion are considered. The algorithm automatically decides whether grid expansion is economical or whether other solutions like local generation or storage are more cost-effective.
RIZM provides baseline cost data that you can review and adjust. For special cases, an iterative approach for inverse calculations is also possible, working backwards from known results to determine missing parameters.
Depending on complexity, an optimization takes a few minutes to several hours. Clustering methods significantly reduce computation time for large systems. Results are provided as interactive visualizations and CSV exports.
