Optimal design and operation of an integrated multi-energy system for smart cities

Cities are at the center of the sustainable development challenge. Growing urbanization, intensity of resource-usage, and related emissions lead to high incentives for local governments to act. Large-scale integration of intermittent renewable energy is an important part of their strategy. However, a smooth transition would also strongly benefit from an integrated energy system. This paper proposes a model outline of a hybrid energy network and shows some first, promising results of a proof of concept. Optimization techniques are applied to find the correlations between a city’s electricity, heat and gas demand profiles and the (non-)intermittent supply profiles and technologies, considering energy conversion and storage technologies, to quantify the benefits of integrating the energy infrastructure of electricity, heat and gas. This model provides means to evaluate a future integrated energy system in a city at an operational scale and form a basis to expand into a planning scale.