Integrated Multi Energy Optimization to Increase Renewable Generation Hosting Capacity

Connecting decentralized renewable production to the electricity distribution networks can generate voltage and/or current constraints, often requiring network reinforcement or renewable generation curtailment. Coupling electricity and heating networks through power‐to‐heat technologies offers an alternative to alleviate these constraints. This paper analyzes the impact of such coupling on the integration of renewable electric energy generation with a heat pump connected to a district heating grid to absorb surplus renewable generation. This coupling alleviates constraints on the electric grid and offers a renewable decarbonized alternative heat source to the coupled district heating grid, originally supplied by a CHP. A bi‐level optimization framework is proposed to solve both operational and planning problems of the coupled electric and thermal networks. Results demonstrate that the proposed coupling method can increase renewable hosting capacity of distribution grids while avoiding network reinforcement and curtailment of renewable generation. A sensitivity analysis is conducted to assess the robustness of this approach. In the studied use case, the photovoltaic generation hosting capacity can be doubled while maintaining the same total system costs, or alternatively, total costs can be reduced by up to 50% for a given renewable production capacity. Adding thermal storage can further reduce these costs by up to 40%.