Stochastic Optimal Operation of Coordinated Natural Gas and Electricity Network with a focus on power-to-gas technologies and wind power curtailment

As the need for renewable energy sources like wind energy grows to support worldwide efforts to reduce carbon footprints. There is an urgent need to find a solution to the challenges of its intermittent nature and the issue of curtailment. To balance the current erratic supply and demand, creative energy solutions are needed. Power-to-gas (P2G) technology uses water electrolysis to convert excess renewable energy into hydrogen gas, offering a workable alternative for the use of excess wind energy to address the issues of erratic supply and demand. This paper presents a stochastic optimal operation of coordinated natural gas and electricity network model which balances the electricity and gas demand considering power-to-gas technologies and wind power curtailment. To show that the suggested model is effective, case studies with/without P2G are carried out on a coordinated UK 16-bus network and a Belgian 20-node gas network. Simulation results illustrate that P2G was beneficial in the operation of the proposed model in terms of total operational cost reduced from 542971.9 M/$ to 538538.5 M/$ and wind curtailment reduced from 79.0% to 71.5%.