Integrated Planning of Electricity, Heat, and Gas Infrastructure

In this paper, an integrated and multi-area model for expansion planning of electricity, heat, and gas infrastructure is developed with the objective of minimizing cost over the planning horizon. In the proposed model, heat and gas demand are modeled explicitly and the interdependencies between electricity, heat, and gas energy systems are represented. Furthermore, a carbon tax is modeled as an operating cost to analyze its impact on the expansion planning outcome. The introduced centralized model can be used to design incentives and to provide guidelines for different independent energy sector investments. Simulation results on the Alberta energy system indicate that the proposed integrated model outperforms the previously proposed methods in literature, which generally do not explicitly model heat and gas demand, in terms of cost and greenhouse gas emissions simultaneously.