Colloquia

Summary

The adoption of climate change mitigating solutions like increasing the penetration of intermittent renewable energy sources (RES) and electrifying many aspects of society is resulting in higher loads on the power grid. As society is moving to a more electrified energy system, a congested grid is the limiting factor in the ongoing energy transition. As national climate goals are to be met in the upcoming decades, the transformation to an improved power infrastructure poses significant challenges. Grid expansion projects experience long duration times, therefore research towards more efficient usage of current assets is vital. Energy hubs (EHs) have been proposed as a smart integrated energy system capable of balancing energy supply from RES and demand by exploiting storage and conversion technologies and intelligently steering the energy flows. Working with more than one energy carrier (electricity and heat), EHs provide more flexibility to the energy system. Despite their growing popularity, there is still uncertainty about the impact they have on the power grid and whether grid congestion can be reduced by these systems. This study aims to provide additional insights towards the impact and behaviour of EH systems. In this work, the EH concept is introduced as a mixed-integer quadratic programming (MIQP) problem with minimising grid peak loads as the objective function. An optimisation solver is employed to find the optimal behaviour of the proposed integrated energy system. This study demonstrates the EH system to be capable of reducing peaks in the power grid by 78.6% compared to an all-electric energy infrastructure. The ability to convert electricity into heat increased the system's performance by almost threefold. Furthermore, a 99.3% reduction of CO2 emissions is achieved in the best performing scenario.