Cost Efficient Operation of a Hydrogen Enabled Zero-Carbon Multi-Energy System

Fully utilizing renewable energy with hydrogen storage technology provides a viable path to building a zero carbon energy system. It is crucial to plan and synergize the operation of renewable, hydrogen, electrical, and thermal energy production, storage and utilization systems in order to minimize energy supply costs. This paper presents a coordinated long term (yearly operation scheduling) and short term (day-ahead and intra-day scheduling) optimization based operation approach for a hydrogen-enabled zero-carbon energy system (HZES) that incorporates renewable energy sources, multi-energy conversion devices, and long and short term energy storage. An integrated end-to-end prediction-optimization (IPO) method is developed to train the PV generation prediction model, which combines upstream renewable energy output predictions with downstream energy system operation optimization. This approach reduces operation decision gaps caused by renewable energy output prediction errors during training to enhance renewable energy utilization. The actual results are obtained from the HZES in production operation and the energy supply costs are compared with four other practical energy systems. It is shown that the HZES outperforms the current power grid and the city heating utility significantly in terms of the total annualized capital and operating cost by 37% to 49%. Furthermore, compared to the current rule-based operation process, the new optimization based method achieves more than 40% operational cost savings.