Inexact Community-Scale Energy Systems Planning Model

Energy systems planning models are useful for supporting decisions of urban energy systems planning and environmental management. The previous studies on energy systems modeling were too aggregated to reach insight into the interactive characteristics of energy-related activities at a community level, and thus were unable to address the unique environmental and economic features associated with community-scale energy management systems. In addition, they could hardly deal with multiple uncertainties expressed as interval values and probabilistic distributions. Therefore, the objective of this study is to develop an interval-parameter chance-constraint community-scale energy systems planning model (IPC-CEM) for supporting energy and environmental systems management under uncertainty. IPC-CEM will then be applied to the planning of a community-scale energy system to demonstrate its applicability. The results indicated that the developed model had advantages in reflecting complexities of various uncertainties as well as dealing with problems of urban infrastructure development and greenhouse gas-emission management within community-scale energy management systems.