Energy engineering

The global trend towards urbanisation is demanding a cost-intensive expansion in the energy systems we use in our burgeoning cities. At the same time, the switch to a more sustainable energy economy is requiring large-scale investments to enable the conversion of existing heat, cold and electricity supply structures. This situation means that cities are having to face up to major challenges, but this also represents a significant design opportunity. Decentralised energy systems consisting of CHP plants, photovoltaic systems, solar heat and heat-pumps outperform conventional, centralised power station systems in terms of efficiency and are therefore regarded as a suitable system when it comes to supplying residential districts in our cities in the future.

Due to the fact, however, that generating energy and consuming it using smaller-scale systems is frequently subject to significant fluctuations and high peak loads, particularly flexible energy generation components and integrated electricity and heat storage facilities are required in order to ensure the security of supply. Thanks to the smart networking of consumers, generators and storage systems, fluctuations and losses during transmission and storage can be avoided, thereby reducing the level of investment required for the expansion and operation of supply systems.

Within the field of Power and Storage Technologies at the Nuremberg Campus of Technology (NCT), researchers from Nuremberg Tech are collaborating with industrial partners and with other research institutions to develop new technologies for the re-use of waste heat, for generating cold and for the storage of electricity and heat, and to test them out in an application-oriented way. Within Nuremberg Tech, the research focus on Power and Storage Technology being pursued at the NCT resides with the Research Professorship in Distributed Energy Transformation and Energy Storage (held by: Prof. Frank Opferkuch).