Simultaneous planning of energy carriers by employing efficient storages within main and auxiliary energy hubs via a comprehensive MILP modeling in distribution network

The energy hub concept is one of the suitable options to attain the flexibility, efficiency, and reliability of the multi-energy systems. In an energy hub, energy carriers’ inputs face the demands that are the outputs of the energy hub after it is generated, transformed, stored, or directly consumed. When this concept is employed in a distribution network, the energy planning will be so prominent considering its overall cost reduction along with increasing the profitability of generation units. In this paper, the concept of energy hub is employed in a network-based distribution system in two types of main and auxiliary energy hubs. Here, the energy hubs consist of a wide variety of components included renewable and non-renewable power plants, converters, storages, and cogeneration units on the production side to supply the electricity, heating, cooling, natural gas, hydrogen, and water demands on the output side of the hub. Besides, the demand response program is also proposed to be applied to four demands of electricity, gas, cooling energy and water which results in efficient planning to reform the energy consumption pattern with financial incentives alongside the energy not supplied index. Therefore in this paper, a cost-based mixed-integer linear programming model is proposed for the short term planning and to obtain the optimum solution for the production and load dispatch in a distribution network containing energy hubs. To evaluate the performance of the proposed structure and planning method, the presented model is implemented on the 18-bus test network and in the summer and winter seasons with different consumption behaviors. Also, a 118-bus distribution test network is employed to show the comparative results in a large understudy system more precisely. As the results obtained by this planning model, it can be observed more cost-saving and also a more smoothly consumption pattern in demands.