Heterogeneous resource management in energy hubs with self-consumption: Contributions and application example

Abstract

The energy hub concept and modeling methodology are widely employed tools for solving resource conversionand storage scheduling problems. For instance, industrial clusters might benefit from determining the suitabletime to operate their facilities and to sell electricity to the public power grid, according to legal, economic orenvironmental factors. In this paper, novel elements are introduced in order to more accurately represent realplants and to reduce the amount of decision variables. The major innovation is to consider devices consuming aresource which is not related to the quantity of output produced, by attaching binary decision variables tocertain energy hub outputs. Secondly, a path vector is defined to take into account the flows of resources withinthe system instead of employing a variable for each branch between the components. The third innovationconsists of an additional vector to express the amount of output resources sold from the energy hub, includingconstraints for those resources which are exported and imported through the same medium. An extended energyhub model is first proposed and then applied to a real plant example, including multiple and heterogeneousresources and performing a comparison between days with different demands, weather conditions and electricityprices. The results obtained in the selected scenarios demonstrate a logical operation scheduling, and thereforevalidate the proposed approach.