Carbon emission responsibility accounting in renewable energy-integrated DC traction power systems

Abstract

The increasing importance of carbon peaking and neutrality necessitates the development of novel carbon financing policies. Accurate calculation of carbon emission responsibility (CER) is crucial for these policies. The carbon emission flow (CEF) method provides reasonable approaches for CER accounting concerning electrical energy. However, CER accounting in DC traction power systems (TPSs) is difficult due to their peculiarities: the prosumer characteristics of rail vehicles and difficulty in real-time power flow tracing due to a lack of measurement. This study presents a practical method to determine the CER of renewable energy-integrated DC TPSs, providing fair CEF allocation between TPSs and AC utility. To address these difficulties, this study tailors the CEF method considering the peculiarities in the railway transportation domain. An overall CER accounting framework is proposed to achieve CER accounting, including two application scenarios: system planning and real-time operation, where a practical real-time power flow tracing method and a CEF model for rail vehicles are proposed. A case study based on real engineering data validates the effectiveness of the proposed methods, the fairness of the proposed method compared to the average factor method (AFM) is verified, the time series solutions are analyzed, and the application of the proposed methods for planning and real-time operation is also presented.