12. Optimal Operation of Renewable-Based Residential Energy Hubs for Minimizing PV Curtailment

This chapter models a residential multi-carrier energy system as an energy hub. A combined heat and power (CHP) unit, a gas boiler, a heat storage system, a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV), and photovoltaic (PV) generation are modeled in the proposed residential energy hub to provide heat and electrical demands. This chapter also investigates the issue of PV generation curtailment in the operation of the residential energy hub. To this end, an optimization-based problem is solved not only to minimize the operation cost of the energy hub, but also to minimize the PV curtailment. The impact of PHEV and the heat storage system on the operation of the energy hub and the amount of PV curtailment is investigated in this chapter. Since the availability of PHEV during a day is not usually concurrent with the PV generation, the results show that considering PHEV in the energy hub model may have low impacts on the PV curtailment. However, the presence of the storage system can reduce the PV curtailment significantly. The presented study and results show the effectiveness of the proposed optimization procedure in this chapter.