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 accounttheoff-designcurvesandcostfunctionsforthedifferentgenerators. Four different solutionsareinvestigated,comparingtheoperativestrategiesintermsofenergyef?ciency, 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.
