Optimal Scheduling of Multi-Carrier Energy Hubs with Demand Response and Electric Vehicles for Cost Reduction and Flexibility Enhancement

Worldwide, energy hubs (EHs) have been developed by integrating different technologies for power transformation, storage, and generation, as a critical key to overcoming resource insufficiency and environmental issues. Moreover, the energy center performs a major task by enhancing system flexibility, efficiency, and reliability. The attention to electric vehicles (EVs) and renewable energies has also increased. An EH consists of combined cooling, heating, and power (CCHP) units, wind turbines (WTs), photovoltaics (PVs), hydrogen electrolyzers, fuel cells (FCs), water desalination systems, auxiliary boilers (AB), plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) and energy storage systems (ESSs); ice storage conditioners (ISCs), solar powered compressed air energy storage (SPCAES), thermal energy storage systems (TESSs), hydrogen storage (H2S). This paper employs a demand response program (DRP), for load curtailment, shifting, and flexible load modeling. In pursuit of reducing the total costs. Herein, four scheduling cases are evaluated with different charging modes of EVs and applying the DRP. The numerical results reveal that, by implementing the electrical DRP (EDRP), the final costs are successfully reduced. Compared to the base case, the total costs are reduced by 4.0% when the EDRP is applied. While the total costs are decreased by 4.8% when both electrical and thermal DRPs are employed. The results also demonstrate that by implementing both DRPs and coordinated mode EVs, total costs can be further decreased by 6.3%.