As future energy systems aim to be more efficient, cost-effective, environmentally benign, and interconnected with each other, their design and operation become ever challenging tasks for decision-makers, engineers, and scientists. Sustainability of life on earth will be heavily affected by the improvements of these complex energy systems. Therefore, experts from various fields need to come together to find common solution strategies. However, since different technologies are usually developed separately by their own technical community, a generally accepted unified systematic approach to tackle integrated systems is lacking. With this article, we want to introduce and highlight the power of energy systems engineering as a generic framework to arrive at synergistic solutions to complex energy and environmental problems. Tools of energy systems engineering are numerous, and its application areas cover a wide range of energy systems. In this commentary, we present an overview of state-of-the-art methodologies of energy systems engineering, list its applications and describe few examples in detail, and finally introduce some possible new directions.

中文翻译：

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能源系统工程-导览

随着未来能源系统的目标是提高效率，成本效益，环境友好性以及相互联系，它们的设计和操作对于决策者，工程师和科学家而言，将成为具有挑战性的任务。这些复杂能源系统的改进将严重影响地球生命的可持续性。因此，各个领域的专家需要共同寻找共同的解决方案策略。但是，由于不同的技术通常是由其各自的技术社区单独开发的，因此缺乏解决集成系统的普遍接受的统一系统方法。在本文中，我们想介绍并强调能源系统工程的力量，作为通用框架，以达成针对复杂能源和环境问题的协同解决方案。能源系统工程的工具众多，其应用领域涵盖了广泛的能源系统。在这篇评论中，我们概述了能源系统工程的最新方法，列出了其应用，并详细描述了一些示例，最后介绍了一些可能的新方向。