Techno-economic feasibility of trigeneration systems with Thermal storage: The impact of the load size and spark spread rates.

• Methodology combining simulation and clustering with multi-criteria decision-making. • Load dominance rates and ternary diagrams are proposed to analyze the impact of load size. • New insights regarding the conditions that promote economic benefits when using CCHP-TS systems. • Depending on the SS rate, a dominance or equilibrium of loads influence the percentage of savings obtained. Trigeneration systems with Thermal storage (CCHP-TS) allow a distributed generation of energy. They also contribute to reducing greenhouse gas emissions by producing electricity, heating, and cooling from the same fuel. Current research targets their operational performance and feasibility. Nevertheless, expressing these concepts into standard criteria could foster their adoption by investors and policy-makers. This paper finds some rules of thumb for the technical and economic feasibility of CCHP-TS systems. The analysis comprises 600 scenarios, assessing the impact of different levels of spark spread (SS) rate and load size of Electricity, Heating, and Cooling. The methodology first optimizes the energy system with DER-CAM and after analyzes the output data through the clustering method k-means and the Multi-Criteria Decision-Making method ELECTRE 1S. Moreover, the paper proposes the dominance load rates to quantify the relative size of electricity, heating and cooling loads. The results show that for high SS rates, the percentage of savings improves with the dominance of electric loads. While for small SS rates, the improvement comes from the equilibrium of loads. Furthermore, for any SS, a high dominance of electricity promotes the use of Absorption and Cooling Storage, reducing the Heat Scrap. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]