An innovative energy management framework for cooperative operation management of electricity and natural gas demands

Highlights: • A method for simultaneous smoothing of electricity and gas profiles is presented. • Individual device impacts on cost and demand profile smoothness are studied. • It is found that power to gas unit can flatten both electricity and gas profiles. • Results show that electric storage has the highest impact on reducing energy cost. -- Abstract: Introduction of the power to gas and combined heat and power technologies, has led to remarkable interdependency between electrical and gas systems. By taking advantage of this interdependency, cleaner and more efficient energy management systems could be implemented. This paper attempts to establish an innovative energy management framework which takes advantage of this interdependency and devices like power to gas and combined heat and power to simultaneously smoothen electricity and natural gas demand profiles for a year ahead. The method outperforms this task using the electricity profile valleys to reduce peak natural gas consumption and using natural gas profile valleys to shave electricity consumption peak. In this way, the stress on both networks for supplying demand in peak periods is released. The proposed method is able to achieve demand smoothness and cost reduction objectives considering penalty factors for demand variance. For this purpose, multiple integrated energy hubs are used to simulate the energy consumption of an area. The designed mixed integer linear model is handled by General Algebraic Modeling Software and CPLEX solver. The results demonstrate that by applying the proposed method, the system is able to save 16.92% in the energy cost and decrease electricity and natural gas demand standard deviations by 8.34% and 66.64%, respectively.