Best operative strategy for energy management of a cruise ship employing different distributed generation technologies

Abstract This paper aims to study the application of distributed generation technologies on a naval energy system, investigating the best operating strategy for energy management throughout an annual load profile. The thermo-economic analysis is performed considering electrical and thermal load demands referred to hotel and service loads of a cruise ship (around 6 MWel), both variable with the season and the period of the day, taking into account the off-design curves and cost functions for the different generators. Four different solutions are investigated, comparing the operative strategies in terms of energy efficiency, CO 2 emissions and annual costs. The analysis is performed with dedicated software for the thermo-economic time-dependent analysis, developed by the University of Genoa. The thermo-economic approach has general validity, thus it can be also applied to different kinds of ships, even considering different technologies for energy generation and storage.