A novel smart community: Combining a flexible heating system as electrical demand response to enhance local renewable energy integration

Due to ineffective coordination, energy communities integrating wind turbines (WTs) and photovoltaic/ photothermal (PV/PT) systems often fail to fully harness local renewable energy sources. To overcome this challenge, this paper proposes a novel smart community (SC) framework that incorporates a flexible heating system (HS). The proposed HS facilitates dispatchable solar power generation and responsive heat–electricity demand management by integrating medium-high-temperature photothermal (MHTPT) and ground-source heat pump (GSHP) technologies. Meanwhile, a dual-objective scheduling model is formulated to minimize the operating costs and carbon emissions of the SC system, and its effectiveness is validated through case studies. A hybrid solution architecture combining branch-and-reduce with multi-learning-task is proposed to efficiently solve the mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) model and generate multiple optimal Pareto solutions. Case studies on different system configurations validate the superior performance of the proposed SC in reducing operating costs and carbon emissions while enhancing local renewable energy integration. Additionally, the impact of varying renewable on-grid tariffs on SC system operations is analyzed.