An inter-city energy migration framework for regional energy balance through daily commuting fuel-cell vehicles

Yingdong He, Yuekuan Zhou*, Jia Liu, Zhengxuan Liu, Guoqiang Zhang

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleScientificpeer-review

9 Citations (Scopus)
15 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Spatiotemporal energy interaction and sharing are promising solutions to penetrate renewable energy, enhance grid power stability, and improve regional energy flexibility. However, the current literature is restrained in a small-scale neighborhood level, without considering inter-city energy migration through spatiotemporal complementarity between renewable-abundant regions (like suburb or countryside areas) and demand-shortage regions (like city centers). In this study, the energy interaction boundary is extended from a neighborhood scale to an inter-city scale, to maximize the renewable energy penetration, demand coverage, and reduce regional energy imbalance. This study firstly proposes a holistic framework on inter-city transportation-based energy migration, consisting of a residential community with rooftop photovoltaic systems and electrical batteries, an office building, hydrogen vehicles (HVs), a hydrogen (H2) station, and local power grids, for the energy transmission between building groups in spatially different regions through the daily commuting of HVs. Optimal grid-regulation strategies are thereafter proposed and adopted to stabilize the grid power and reduce energy costs. Parametric analysis on energy trading strategies and prices has been conducted, to improve the participation motivations of different stakeholders. Results indicate that, compared to the reference case with isolated buildings and vehicles, the transportation-based energy migration framework covers 23.2 % of the office energy demand and elevates the community's renewable self-use ratio from 72.7 % to 98.6 %. Meanwhile, the maximum grid-export power in the renewable-abundant region (suburb residential community) and the annual grid-import power in the demand-shortage region (city-center office) are reduced by up to 86.9 % (from 155.7 to 20.4 kW) and 29.4 % (from 49.0 to 34.6 kW), respectively. Moreover, even considering the fuel cell degradation cost of HVs, the transportation-based energy migration framework reduces the operating costs of the office building and HVs (the H2 cost and the fuel cell degradation cost) by 16.4 % (from $52791.3 to $44154.7) and 1.7 % (from $27172.5 to $26707.4), respectively. Afterward, compared to the reference case, the peak-shaving and load-shaping grid-regulation strategies can decrease the peak grid-export power of the community by about 71.6 % (from 155.7 to 44.2 kW), and the maximum grid-import power of the office by 23.7 % (from 49.0 to 37.4 kW), respectively. Furthermore, the transportation-based energy migration framework is economically feasible, only when the renewable export price for H2 production is 0.07 $/kWh, the onsite-renewable-generated H2 lower than 6.5 $/kg for the HV owners, and the vehicle-to-building electricity lower than 0.3 $/kWh for the office building. This study provides a novel inter-city energy migration framework with hydrogen networks to enhance district energy sharing, improve regional energy balance and reduce carbon emission, together with frontier guidelines on energy trading prices to promote participation motivations from different stakeholders.

Original languageEnglish
Article number119714
Number of pages21
JournalApplied Energy
Volume324
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2022

Bibliographical note

Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository 'You share, we take care!' - Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care
Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.

Keywords

  • Distributed hydrogen infrastructure
  • Energy trading
  • Hydrogen economy
  • Innovative Grid-regulation strategy
  • Spatiotemporal energy sharing network
  • Transportation-based Inter-city energy migration

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