Cost-effective operation of the urban energy system with variable supply and demand via coordination of multi-energy flows

The increasing penetration of intermittent renewable energy and diversified energy loads have put forward higher requirements for multi-energy management. In this paper, a novel robust optimisation problem is presented to investigate the operational economy and reliability of the integrated energy system. Given the uncertainties on both sides of supply and demand, the polyhedral uncertainty set is reconstructed from spatial and temporal dimensions. The adjustable budgets are introduced to provide diversified solutions that account for both risky and conservative schemes. On this basis, a two-stage robust optimisation model with the operational constraints of coupled multi-energy networks is formulated, which is solved by the column-and-constraint generation algorithm. In addition to focusing on economic performance, the networked multi-energy flows, nodal operation state, and supply-demand balance are incorporated in the system sensitivity analysis under various uncertainty budgets. Extensive tests on an urban energy system show that the proposed model can compensate the multidimensional uncertainties by energy conversion and fine-tuning controllable variables on sub-networks. The computational results also indicate that the proposed method leads to significant cost savings and unbalance rate reduction.