A Beginner's Guide to Sustainable Energy Systems Modelling and Optimization is a hands-on, tutorial-style reference designed to equip engineers, planners, researchers, and energy professionals with practical tools and methods to tackle energy planning and decarbonization challenges. The book provides a step-by-step guide to building, analyzing, and optimizing sustainable energy systems-starting from fundamental concepts and progressing through applications using widely accessible platforms like Microsoft Excel, LINGO, P-graph, and Python. By illustrating real-world energy systems, supply chain, and regional/national energy planning problems through a consistent structure across chapters, this book demystifies the modelling and optimization process, helping readers gain confidence in applying what they learn to their specific domains.
- Bridges the gap between engineering, policy, and sustainability.
- Offers clear explanations, structured examples, and direct pathways to practical outcomes.
- Walks the reader through solving the same three types of energy problems using different tools throughout the book, reinforcing learning and enabling direct comparison.
- Requires no programming experience needed to get started: starts with user-friendly and accessible platforms and gradually introduces more advanced tools.
- Each section ends with a practical evaluation of the strengths, limitations, and ideal use-cases for the featured tool, providing foundational exposure to readers about when and why to use each platform.
- Features case studies at three levels of energy problems, ranging from energy system design problems, supply chain synthesis problems to regional/national energy planning problems.
Whether transitioning from spreadsheet modelling or looking to expand their toolkit to more sophisticated or open-source platforms, professional engineers in energy systems design, policy, and industrial decarbonization will find this guide particularly valuable for generating data-driven insights, testing different planning scenarios, and optimizing for cost, emissions, and energy efficiency.
Autorentext
How Bing Shen is a Distinguished Associate Professor at the Swinburne University of Technology Sarawak Campus, renowned for his contributions to sustainable process integration, circular economy, and energy planning. He earned a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus and held a postdoctoral research appointment at Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS. Dr. How has established himself as a leading researcher committed to real-world impact and his work has directly contributed to decarbonization strategies for key industrial sectors. Beyond research, Dr. How is passionate about talent development, particularly in process systems engineering.
Maria Victoria Migo-Sumagang is an Associate Professor at the University of the Philippines Los Baños (UP Los Baños). She obtained her Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from De La Salle University Manila, where she received the Outstanding Dissertation Award. Dr. Sumagang is a registered Associate ASEAN Engineer and a member of the National Research Council of the Philippines. Her research focuses on the application of process systems engineering to design and evaluate optimal portfolios of carbon dioxide removal technologies. Beyond research, Dr. Sumagang actively bridges science, policy, and industry.
Jean Pimentel Losada is a Research Engineer and Doctor of Chemical Engineering, specializing in Process Systems Engineering at Széchenyi István University, Hungary. He earned his Ph.D. from the Faculty of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, where his research focused on the synthesis and optimization production processes, with a strong emphasis on advancing sustainability in industrial systems.
Viknesh Andiappan is the Associate Director of the School of Research at Swinburne University of Technology Sarawak Campus. He also serves as an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Engineering, Computing and Science where he does research and teaching. He leads the Sustainable and Clean Energy Research Cluster under the Centre of Sustainable Technologies. He is the coeditor of the book Optimization for Energy Systems and Supply Chains: Fundamentals and Applications, published by CRC Press. His area of specialization centers on developing process systems engineering tools to design and optimize net-zero energy systems and supply chains.