Eco-environmental Impacts of x-to-x energy conversion on interconnected multi-energy microgrids: A multi-objective optimization

Abstract

The environmental concerns, most notably the release of greenhouse gases due to global warming effects, are significant to energy production processes. This paper investigates multi-energy transactive microgrid (METMG) systems considering environmental and economic concerns using energy conversion technologies (X2X). Utilizing the conversion of a different form of energy by the X2X technologies is a new concept that this paper tries to investigate its usefulness in economic and environmental aspects. The X2X technologies are used in an energy-hub unit that has the duty of converting different forms of energy to each other. The energy hub is connected to all the METMGs and both receive and sends converted forms of energy to METMGs. Both the economic and environmental concerns are considered by optimizing two separate objective functions for each one in a cooperative manner. The goal of the economic objective function is to decrease operational costs, and the goal of the environmental objective function is to reduce the release of emission gases. The fuzzy algorithm is used to ensure fairness in optimizing dual cooperative objectives. The simulation model consists of three METMG and an energy hub where the conversion of different forms of energy is conducted. The METMGs have different forms of energy sources and energy carrier loads such as power, heat, and hydrogen. It is concluded that by applying X2X technologies in the energy hub operation, the costs and the released emissions are reduced by 56 % and 48 %, respectively. This shows the effectiveness of the proposed structure in the reduction of costs and emissions which answers the economic and environmental concerns.