Toward Small Scale Renewable Energy Hub-Based Hybrid Fuel Stations: Appraising Structure and Scheduling

In recent years, there has been a rapid change in the portfolio of road vehicles. This transformation needs to be supported by reshaping fuel stations. The existing structures can be modified to supply multiple vehicle types while utilizing renewable energies. In this article, we introduce a hybrid fuel station (HFS) to supply both electric and natural gas vehicles. We incorporate an energy hub and thoroughly explain the structure and components in detail. The configuration of the proposed HFS includes renewable energy sources (RESs), a power-to-gas unit (P2G), a natural gas distributed generator (NGDG), an energy storage device, a compressor, and a gas storage device. The optimal operation of the HFS will be under uncertainty due to multiple parameters that display unpredictable behaviors. Thus, a stochastic scheduling scheme considering features of the proposed HFS is presented. The resulted optimization is modeled as mixed-integer linear programming. The validity and capabilities of structure and scheduling schemes are evaluated with several numerical simulations. In particular, the impact of RESs, P2G, and NGDG on the operating cost of the HFS is analyzed. The results demonstrate that the economic benefits of the proposed HFS are significantly higher than a conventional one.