Techno-Economic and Environmental Assessment of Coordinated Operation of Regional Grid-Connected Energy Hubs Considering High Penetration of Wind Power

Nowadays, the high penetration of renewable energy sources (RESs) with non-uniformly distributed patterns has created unprecedented challenges for regional power systems to maintain system flexibility and reliability. These technical challenges obligate power system operators to curtail part of the produced renewable energy at various scheduling intervals. Motivated by these challenges, grid-connected energy hubs are seen as a way forward to boost system flexibility, decrease the rate of renewable power curtailment, and increase energy efficiency. However, simplified models may significantly affect the performance of the grid-connected energy hubs in practice. Hence, this paper proposes a holistic structure to determine the optimal coordinated operation of the grid-connected energy hubs and the regional power system by relying on the high penetration of wind power. In this regard, various fundamental challenges that have not yet been addressed in an integrated manner, including the CO2 emission rate and the amount of curtailed renewable energy along with total operating costs of the integrated energy system, are among the main objectives of the optimization problem. The proposed structure is developed in the form of tractable mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problem to handle the day-ahead security-constrained unit commitment (SCUC). The information-gap decision theory (IGDT)-based robust model is used for accurate modeling of wind power uncertainty. The characteristics of the proposed IGDT-based robust SCUC model and its benefits are investigated through several technical case studies conducted on the modified 6-bus and 24-bus test systems. The simulation results validate the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed structure. According to the obtained results for the 6-bus test system, networked energy hubs can help the system operator to reduce the total operating cost, wind power curtailment cost, and CO2 emission cost by 16.62%, 100%, and 30.44%, respectively, through utilizing up-to-date energy conversion facilities and energy storage systems as well as managing energy demands. It can be seen that the proposed strategy is a very effective step towards achieving a 100% renewable energy system.