Low-carbon Operation of Combined Heat and Power Integrated Plants Based on Solar-assisted Carbon Capture

Accelerating the development of renewable energy and reducing CO2 emissions have become a general consensus and concerted action of all countries in the world. The electric power industry, especially thermal power industry, is the main source for fossil energy consumption and CO2 emissions. Since solvent-based post-combustion carbon capture technology would bring massive extra energy consumption, the application of solar-assisted carbon capture technology has attracted extensive attention. Due to the important role of coal-fired combined heat and power plants for serving residential and industrial heating districts, in this paper, the low-carbon operation benefits of combined heat and power integrated plants based on solar-assisted carbon capture (CHPIP-SACC) are fully evaluated in heat and power integrated energy system with a high proportion of wind power. Based on the selected integration scheme, a linear operation model of CHPIP-SACC is developed considering energy flow characteristics and thermal coupling interaction of its internal modules. From the perspective of system-level operation optimization, the day-ahead economic dispatch problem based on a mix-integer linear programming model is presented to evaluate the low-carbon benefits of CHPIP-SACC during annual operation simulation. The numerical simulations on a modified IEEE 39-bus system demonstrate the effectiveness of CHPIP-SACC for reducing CO2 emissions as well as increasing the downward flexibility. The impact of different solar field areas and unit prices of coal on the low-carbon operation benefits of CHPIP-SACC is studied in the section of sensitivity analysis.