Integrating hydrogen into Ontario’s energy hub: A robust, carbon-aware framework for power–heat–transport

Decarbonizing electricity generation, heating, and transportation simultaneously requires integrated planning tools that coordinate multiple energy carriers while remaining reliable under uncertainty. This paper develops a carbon-aware and uncertainty-resilient optimization framework for a grid-connected multi-energy hub that co-optimizes electricity, heating, cooling, and transportation services with an explicit hydrogen sub-hub. The model is formulated as a mixed-integer linear program over annual planning states from 2025 to 2050, representing 25 inter-year transition intervals. The hub integrates photovoltaic and wind generation, dispatchable natural gas-based conversion, storage, demand response, EV charging and V2G, and a storage-mediated hydrogen chain comprising an electrolyzer, hydrogen storage, FCEV demand, and stationary fuel-cell reconversion. Two policy archetypes are examined: a carbon tax, represented by an emissions-cost term in the objective, and a net-zero pathway, represented by a declining emissions constraint. Feasibility-critical operational uncertainty is treated through budgeted robust optimization with deviation bounds ± 30 % deviation bounds and a tunable uncertainty budget, applied to electricity and heat balances. Under the adopted representative-period design, the Ontario case yields an electrolyzer expansion from 300 MW in 2025 to 3800 MW in 2050, hydrogen-storage expansion from 2000 to 37,000 MWh, and a robustness premium of approximately 6.6%–9.0% in the policy cases. These numerical magnitudes are conditional on the compression of each planning year into a representative 48-hour window. Because this aggregation excludes sequences longer than that window, the 37-GWh result is not a validated seasonal-adequacy requirement and is likely downward-biased when multi-day low-renewable episodes are binding; the reported robustness premium should likewise be interpreted as conditional on the adopted temporal representation.