A Novel Planning Method for Multi-Scale Integrated Energy System

The interdependencies of electricity, heat and gas systems have significantly increased in recent years, and their further coupling becomes increasingly important to realize the efficient and secure operation of the future low carbon energy systems. Integration of multi-energy systems at different scales represents an opportunity for overall system improvements using the flexibilities across the distributed local small scale to utility energy network level, bus also poses a new challenge of complexity. Therefore, a ‘whole system’ planning approach is essential to capture the synergies and reduce the risks associated with securing an integrated system. However, the common use of centralised planning models overlook the different ownerships of sub-energy systems, and can lead to impractical in reality as the subsystems are often independently managed. In this paper, a novel decentralized planning framework is proposed to allow a two-level integration with multiple subsystems, which includes the lower-level of several local communities and the upper-level of an integrated electricity and gas distribution network. The two levels are separately optimised to minimise their own cost while an overall carbon emission budget is achieved for the whole system using a carbon-led bi-level coordinated strategy. A case study is also provided to illustrate the application of the proposed framework.