Economic and Environmental Policy Analysis for Emission-Neutral Multi-Carrier Microgrid Deployment

Abstract

Energy and global climate change crises are correlated issues since energy generation currently contributes to nearly 40% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and inevitably the escalating energy demand realization exacerbates the ongoing undesirable circumstances. As a viable solution against the concerns above, microgrid deployments with low-emission on-site resources have been receiving increasing attention from power decision-makers. Thus, this study scrutinizes the technical and financial sustainability of deploying a net-zero emission multi-carrier microgrid and determines the optimal generation configurations. Besides, the proposed emission-neutral multi-carrier microgrid model provides insights into the economic prominence of renewable energy incentives together with regulations for the short-term deployment of green resources. The objective of the proposed model is to minimize the multi-carrier microgrid deployment costs associated with the investment, operation, maintenance, energy demand shifting, monthly peak demand charge, emission, and reliability. Furthermore, load prioritization and a novel demand shifting of demand response schemes are propounded to maintain at least the continuous flow of energy for high-prioritized loads. The customer multi-carrier microgrid deployment problem is disintegrated into an investment master problem and an operation subproblem. The results indicate that notable electrical peak mitigation of about 7–23% is procured by employing the demand response scheme. Furthermore, the sensitivity analysis illustrates that renewable penetration of 30% along with dispatchable resources is required to procure the targeted share of green resources within microgrids. Finally, the economic and environmental merits of the proposed emission-neutral multi-carrier microgrid are ensured with savings and the discounted payback period of 131% and 3.977 years, respectively.