Potential of harnessing operational flexibility from public transport hubs to improve reliability and economic performance of urban multi-energy systems: A holistic assessment framework

Abstract

Growing penetration of renewable energy sources (RES) and emerging electrified loads (EEL) are bringing about increased difficulties for the power balancing and efficient operation of energy system, due to the impact of remarkable volatilities introduced. Public transport hub (PTH), as a new-style infrastructure of traffic service carriers, is regarded to offer a cogent solution to this problem, in terms of their potential operational flexibilities permitted by energy regulation, vehicular dispatch, and vehicle-to-grid (V2G) programs. As such, this paper carries out a comprehensive study to investigate the implication of harnessing PTH-enabled flexibility in a context of urban multi-energy system (UMES). The proposed methodology is established on a holistic reliability/economic analysis framework which is designed to indicate how UMES’s performances would vary with different utilization of PTH resources. In order to portray the real-time controllability of PTH during operation, a PTH model that takes into account the impacts of both energy- and service-related aspects has been developed, with particular focus on the interdependencies between the energy and transportation sector. The operational simulation of UMES in presence of PTHs is implemented by using a multi-modal-based optimization model, which captures the effects of PTH flexibility under both normal and contingency scenarios integratedly. By embedding the above formulation into a sequential Monte Carlo simulation-based assessment framework, the contribution of PTH to the reliability and economy of UMES can be determined. Numerical studies are conducted based on an illustrative electricity-gas-heat test case and the real PTH datasets in Beijing. The simulation results confirm the significance of PTH-enabled flexibility in improving the performances of UMES. Also, it is demonstrated that the reserving strategy adopted, the composition of vehicle model, and the travel demand profile of passengers are the noteworthy factors that influence the profitability of PTH exploitation.