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Coordinated preheating can potentially enhance the flexibility of the electricity system, thereby driving significant economic savings. In this context, this paper proposes a novel game-theory based preheating coordination scheme aimed at guaranteeing the effectiveness of collective preheating performed by a large population of households. By adopting an innovative two-phase iterative algorithm, individual households autonomously schedule their heating power allocation to seek for savings in energy bills while smartly maintaining thermal comfort. Meanwhile, the total electricity generation cost decreases at each iteration and converges to an equilibrium solution asymptotically. Compared to the centralised optimization-based energy management control methods, the proposed algorithm effectively reduces the information exchange while significantly reduces computational complexity. The simulation results indicate that the proposed coordination strategy can drive 12.30% cost saving when all households participate in the preheating scheme whereas 11.35% cost increase will be incurred if coordination is absent. Overall, the proposed preheating control algorithm simultaneously benefits both individual households and the whole system by intelligently linking local behaviour with global interests.

In the last decade, a number of severe urban power outages have been caused by extreme natural disasters, e.g., hurricanes, snowstorms and earthquakes, which highlights the need for rethinking current planning principles of urban energy systems and expanding the classical reliability-oriented view. In addition to being reliable to low-impact and high-probability outages, power system should also have high level of resilience to withstand high-impact and low-probability (HILP) events. Compared with power system, multi-energy systems (MESs) have advantages in improving resilience through energy shifting across multiple energy sectors, a variety of generalized energy storage resources and thermal inertia of heat/cooling loads. This paper proposes a resilience-oriented planning method to determine optimal configuration of distribution level MES, e.g., urban energy supply systems, considering comprehensive impacts from supply, network and demand sides in MES. Impacts of energy shifting at supply side, pipe storage at network side and thermal inertia at demand side are described in the same linear modeling framework using energy hub (EH) model. Generalized energy storage resources including centralized and distributed energy storage devices, pipe network storage and building heat capacity are all modeled into centralized energy storage to facilitate an efficient configuration planning of MES.

Multi-energy systems (MESs) make it possible to satisfy consumer's energy demand using multiple coupled energy infrastructures, thus increasing the reliability of the energy supply compared to separate energy systems (SESs). To accurately and efficiently assess and improve the reliability of MESs, this paper proposes a MES reliability and vulnerability assessment method using energy hub (EH) model. The energy conversion, transmission and storage in MESs are compactly and linearly described by EH model, making reliability and vulnerability assessment of MESs tractable. Indices for MES vulnerability assessment are proposed to find the key components for improving MES reliability. Multi-parametric linear programming (MPLP) with a self-adaptive critical region set is proposed to reduce the computational burden caused by iteratively solving LP problems for a large number of samples during the assessment process. The results of a case study show that the proposed reliability and vulnerability assessment method is able to effectively evaluate the energy supply reliability of different energy sectors in MES as well as find the critical component of an MES from reliability perspective to support its planning. The proposed algorithm, i.e., MPLP with a self-adaptive critical region set, can improve the computational efficiency by an order of magnitude compared to the traditional LP method.

AbstractVirtual power plants (VPPs) have been widely recognized as a key enabler for energy system neutrality. The communication traffic of a VPP fundamentally indicates its activeness in interacting with the power system, thus providing a new dimension in depicting the behaviour characteristics of distributed energy resources in VPPs. Therefore, the prediction of communication traffic is significant in improving the control efficiency of VPPs. However, due to the involvement of numerous interactive agents characterised by both individual randomness and coordinative characteristics, traditional prediction models are no longer capable of fitting VPP communication traffic effectively. Therefore, a novel prediction model is introduced that enhances the prediction accuracy by integrating long short‐term memory (LSTM) and variational mode decomposition (VMD). This model employs VMD as the initial step for extracting the intrinsic modes from the traffic sequence, thereby mitigating the impact of incidental noise. Then, LSTM is applied to fit each intrinsic mode individually. Additionally, considering the outer influencing factors, the attention mechanism is incorporated. Finally, all sub‐prediction algorithms are neatly integrated as a whole prediction model. The proposed model is evaluated through simulation prediction using realistic VPP communication traffic data, and the results demonstrate its effectiveness.

Resilient operation of multi-energy microgrid is a critical concept for decarbonization in modern power system. Its goal is to mitigate the low probability and high damaging impacts of electricity interruptions. Electrical vehicles, as a key flexibility provider, can react to unserved demand and autonomously schedule their operation in order to provide resilience. This paper presents a distributed control strategy for a population of electrical vehicles to enhance resilience of an urban energy system experiencing extreme contingency. Specifically, an iterative algorithm is developed to coordinate the charging/discharging schedules of heterogeneous electrical vehicles aiming at reducing the essential load shedding while considering the local constraints and multi-energy microgrid interconnection capacities. Additionally, the gap between electrical vehicle energy and the required energy level at the departure time is also minimised. The effectiveness of the introduced distributed coordinated approach on energy arbitrage and congestion management is tested and demonstrated by a series of case studies.

An energy hub (EH) provides an effective solution to the management of local integrated energy systems (IES), supporting the optimal dispatch and mutual conversion of distributed energy resources (DER) in multi-energy forms. However, the intrinsic stochasticity of renewable generation intensifies fluctuations in the system’s energy production when integrated into large-scale grids and increases peak-to-valley differences in large-scale grid integration, leading to a significant reduction in the stability of the power grid. A distributed privacy-preserving energy scheduling method based on multi-agent deep reinforcement learning is presented for the EH cluster with renewable energy generation. Firstly, each EH is treated as an agent, transforming the energy scheduling problem into a Markov decision process. Secondly, the objective function is defined as minimizing the total economic cost while considering carbon trading costs, guiding the agents to make low-carbon decisions. Lastly, differential privacy protection is applied to sensitive data within the EH, where noise is introduced using energy storage systems to maintain the same gas and electricity purchases while blurring the original data. The experimental simulation results demonstrate that the agents are able to train and learn from environmental information, generating real-time optimized strategies to effectively handle the uncertainty of renewable energy. Furthermore, after the noise injection, the validity of the original data is compromised while ensuring the protection of sensitive information.