An Integrated Steady-State Operation Assessment of Electrical, Natural Gas, and District Heating Networks

This paper studies a unified steady-state power flow analysis considering electrical, natural gas, and district heating networks all together. The important reason of such a view is the increasing utilization of cogeneration plants which makes a strong coupling between these networks. Another reason is the increasing usage of district heating networks because they have a higher efficiency besides a lower carbon dioxide emission than localized boilers. In this paper, interdependencies of the mentioned infrastructures are considered in detail including a nonlinear part-load efficiency performance for units. An integrated framework based on the Newton-Raphson technique is presented to solve the combined power flow problem and several case studies are utilized to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed methodology.