Design and Operation of Urban Energy Network: Integration of Civic, Industrial, and Transportation Sectors

Integration of distributed energy systems for entities can further reduce greenhouse (GHG) emissions beyond the minimum emissions achieved by the individually operated energy systems. This work introduces an optimization approach with relative sizes of integrated entities, design and operation of the integrated energy system equipment, and production rates of plants as decision variables to maximize GHG emissions reduction brought by the integrated operation. The approach also differentiates temperature levels of heating demands to ensure feasible heat transfer by formulating heat balance for each process that requires heating. Results from case studies on an integrated system with a residential building with electric vehicles, a supermarket, a confectionery plant, a bakery plant, and a brewery show that, when optimizing the size of entities, the maximum GHG emissions reduction achieved by the integrated system is relatively constant under the various sizes of the residential building.