Techno-economic, environmental and risk analysis of coordinated electricity distribution and district heating networks with flexible energy resources

Due to the strong dependence between electricity generation and heating supply and the need for optimal use of renewable energies to supply power and heat loads, it is essential to provide an integrated energy management structure for electricity and heating systems. This paper studies the techno-economic and environmental aspects of a combined electricity distribution and district heating system by considering multi-type flexible energy resources and the environmental and practical constraints of both networks. The integrated energy system (IES) is equipped with wind power plants, combined heat and power plants, gas boilers, heat pumps, multi-energy storage systems, electric vehicle parking lots, and multi-energy demand response, as well as the IES operator can take part in the energy market to supply thermal and electrical demands. Besides, a robust strategy is adopted to control the power price uncertainty in the day-ahead scheduling of IES, where a robustness parameter is considered to adjust the risk level of scheduling. The numerical results show that technical and environmental constraints can significantly increase the operation cost of IES by 11.8% and 3.6%, respectively. In addition, multi-type flexible resources can improve the operational flexibility of IES by 16.1%.