Reliability-Based Optimal Planning of Electricity and Natural Gas Interconnections for Multiple Energy Hubs

This paper presents a reliability-based optimal planning model for an interconnection of energy hubs with multiple energy infrastructures. Energy hub represents a coupling among various energy infrastructures for supplying electricity and natural gas loads. The proposed planning problem determines a least-cost network of transmission lines and natural gas pipelines for interconnecting energy hubs from a given set of candidate paths that satisfy probabilistic reliability criteria. The minimal cut-maximal flow algorithm is applied for network flow analyses and calculating transfer capabilities of a multiple energy system. So, in contrast to a single energy infrastructure, the proposed hub planning model enables a synergetic strategy to design multiple energy networks for optimizing the supply economics and satisfying the reliability criteria. Numerical simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed reliability-based planning approach to interconnect energy hubs with multiple energy infrastructures.