Coordinated Optimization of Tourist-based Rural Communities Integrating Tourist Electric Buses and Greenhouses

In recent years, the combination of rural and tourism has developed rapidly and become a promising solution to improve the economy and living standards in rural areas. The tourist rural areas (TRA) have unique power loads, i.e., greenhouses, to provide an appropriate growing environment crops which can further enhance the tourist experience. Additionally, as a kind of vehicle to transport tourists, tourist electric buses (TEBs) are widely used in TRA. The TEBs are regarded as the energy resource connected to the power system. Because of the property of stored electrical energy, they can synergize power systems to dispatch power. Therefore, this work proposes an optimized operational model of TRA’s power system to solve its operation problem. The system operational model considers the power consumption of greenhouses and the transportation of the TEBs. According to the outdoor meteorological condition, i.e., the solar illuminance, the power consumption model of the greenhouse in the TRA is formulized to estimate its power consumption. The spatial-temporal model the TEBs is proposed and the charge and discharge process these TEBs are also modeled based on the spatial-temporal model. Based on the greenhouse and TEBs, this work proposes the optimized model to decide the operational strategies of the generation devices. A rural area with multiple tourist rural communities is used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed operational model. The results show that the existence of TEBs can promote photovoltaic utilization, reduce the power supply from the utility grid, and decrease the system’s operational cost.