A hybrid time-and-event-driven strategy for integrated community energy system planning

Unpredictable events such as technological breakthroughs and energy policy shifts can cause significant errors in the forecast of the parameters like equipment performance and energy demands. Traditional single-stage and fixed multi-stage planning methods struggle with unpredictable events, severely impacting the accuracy of the planning of Integrated Community Energy Systems (ICES). As a solution, a Hybrid Time-and-Event-Driven Multi-Stage Planning (HTED-MSP) method is proposed for ICES. The HTED-MSP method determines the start time of each planning stage based on a combination of time and specific event. Specifically, the event-driven strategy mitigates unpredictable changes in load growth, energy prices, and technological advancements on costs, with trigger conditions determined by marginal cost analysis. Meanwhile, the time-driven strategy enhances long-term reliability of ICES. Considering the significant impact of renewable energy variability and equipment failures on reliability, the HTED-MSP method quantifies these factors using 8760-h normal and N-k contingency scenarios. A State Similarity (SS) method is then proposed to address the computational burden of massive scenarios by simplifying the optimization process into an equation-solving approach. The case study demonstrates that HTED-MSP significantly reduces additional costs caused by unpredictable events. The computational efficiency of the SS method is more than ten times greater than the existing two-stage algorithms.