ORION Addresses Port Grid & Energy Demand at NEIC 2026

ORION was represented at the Nordic Energy Informatics Academy Conference 2026, held from 2 to 4 September at the University of Iceland in Reykjavik. Eliot Southon, research engineer and PhD candidate at partner organisation IMT Mines Albi, presented the project’s work on how ports should size their future renewable energy systems. He is the author of the paper, “Techno-Economic Pareto Sizing of a PV–Battery Port Microgrid for Shore Power Integration”, which is co-authored along with Shervin Kadkhoda-Ahmadi, Mathieu Milhe and Jean-Louis Dirion

The presentation opened with a question about the commonalities between Port of Ålesund and the Port of Reykjavik? As both Ports welcome large cruise vessels that, once at berth, keep running their auxiliary diesel engines, producing carbon dioxide, sulphur and nitrogen oxides, and noise in the middle of a populated waterfront. Shore power, also known as cold ironing, is the answer to that problem: ships plug into the port’s electrical grid instead of burning fuel at the quayside. Between 2030 and 2035, shore power becomes mandatory in the EU for container ships and passenger vessels, meaning vessels at berth will plug into the port’s electrical grid instead of running their auxiliary diesel engines. That turns a port area into a local energy system, and it forces port authorities to decide today, for the next twenty years, how much solar and how much storage to build.

The author focused on two central questions in his study. The first addressed how to estimate energy demand for investment decisions, given that actual ship load profiles are commercially sensitive and unavailable. The second explored how varying photovoltaic and storage capacities influence both the cost and energy performance of the port grid.

In discussing the results of the case study of Porto of Ålesund, Eliot highlighted the study reconstructs future shore-power demand from publicly available maritime traffic data, then tests a wide range of solar and battery capacity combinations over a full year of hourly operation to see how each affects cost and renewable coverage.

For Ålesund, solar emerges as a no-regret investment. The economic optimum is 9 MW of PV with no storage, which lowers the annualised cost by 4.59 per cent against the grid-only baseline, a saving of around 163,000 euros a year, while supplying 17.4 per cent of the port’s energy and cutting the number of hours in which demand exceeds the 10 MW grid connection by 18 per cent. Up to 26 MW of PV is reachable at essentially no net extra cost, and the best overall compromise is 52 MW of PV, covering 54.2 per cent of demand for a 20.5 per cent increase in annualised cost.

Batteries, by contrast, bring no economic value here: storage only enters the Pareto front beyond 64 MW of PV. This means that under Norwegian conditions, the port can build its renewable supply for shore power without investing in storage at all. A ±50 per cent sensitivity analysis on the grid tariff shows that the low-PV configurations are sensitive to electricity prices, while the high-coverage configurations remain robust.

The work is acknowledged as part of ORION, with Ålesund one of the project’s demonstration ports. It feeds the port-decarbonisation planning strand of the project, since the output is a decision-support tool for the port authority that gives a transparent basis for staged investment, in the form of a no-regret 2030 trajectory of 9 to 26 MW of solar. The methodology was deliberately built to be transposable, and the next step is to apply the same framework to Mindelo in Cape Verde, the other ORION port, where high irradiance and a fossil-dominated grid should give very different results. The data and use-case description were built with the ORION partners, with thanks in particular to Andreas Amundsen of partner organization, Sørsida Utvikling AS.

The audience was mainly academic, made up of researchers, professors and PhD candidates from Nordic universities and research institutes, and interest in ORION centred on how the Mindelo case will differ from Ålesund.

For the author, the Icelandic setting made its own point. The country has energy in abundance, with geothermal hot water for heat and hydroelectric power for electricity, yet its grid is fully islanded, with no interconnection to lean on as there is in continental Europe. It was perhaps no surprise, then, that energy communities featured prominently throughout the conference, both as use cases and as data sources.

From Ålesund to Reykjavík to Mindelo, the presentation showed that ports face the same question in very different energy contexts: how to replace diesel at berth with clean, affordable power. The Ålesund results give port authorities a clear, low-risk starting point in solar, while the upcoming Mindelo study will test how the same framework performs where sunlight is abundant and the grid still relies on fossil fuels. This reflects ORION’s approach of developing modular digital twin tools that help ports and communities move towards a more sustainable, fossil-free energy future.