Optimal Capacity Configuration and Multi-Factor Sensitivity Analysis of a Rural Integrated Energy System Incorporating Hydrogen Energy Storage and Carbon Cycling

Against the backdrop of China’s “carbon peaking and carbon neutrality” goals, the abundant renewable resources in rural areas offer natural advantages for developing distributed integrated energy systems. However, the economic feasibility of advanced technologies such as carbon capture and hydrogen energy storage in rural applications requires further evaluation. This paper proposes a rural integrated energy system (RIES) architecture that integrates hydrogen energy storage and carbon cycling, encompassing six types of energy and material carriers—electricity, heat, gas, hydrogen, carbon, and biomass—and establishes a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model aimed at minimizing the total annual cost. Taking a typical rural village in northern China as a case study, capacity configuration optimization is conducted for five technical scenarios, and the impacts of the local generation ratio target, photovoltaic (PV) curtailment penalty coefficient, hydrogen storage efficiency, hydrogen energy subsidies, and equipment investment costs are analyzed.The results indicate that the scenario equipped with both carbon cycling and hydrogen storage achieves the lowest total annual cost, approximately 6.8% lower than that of the conventional RIES, with the local generation ratio increasing by about 4.0 percentage points and the PV curtailment rate dropping to 2.2%. Among these, carbon cycling is the primary source of cost reduction, while hydrogen storage further improves local power supply contribution and PV utilization. Sensitivity analysis indicates that increasing the local generation ratio can reduce electricity purchases from the grid, but at the cost of higher equipment investment; the PV curtailment penalty mainly affects PV capacity configuration and the level of PV curtailment, while hydrogen energy efficiency, subsidies, and equipment cost reductions influence the economic attractiveness of hydrogen energy equipment. The findings can provide a reference for the synergistic deployment of carbon cycling and hydrogen storage in RIES.