Carbon-Aware Operation of Resilient Vertical Farms in Active Distribution Networks

Vertical farming is an emerging sustainable solution to enhance the resilience of the food supply and mitigate the carbon emissions of the agriculture sector amidst population growth, geopolitical risks, and climate change concerns. The proximity of food production to consumers enhances food supply resilience. Besides, the potential to leverage renewable resources to energize Vertical Farms (VF s) paves the way to mitigating their food carbon emissions. At the same time, VF s will introduce new challenges and opportunities within Active Distribution Networks (ADN s). While the electricity demand will increase within the ADN, the flexibility in VF ’s electricity demand provides system operators with demand-side management opportunities. This paper proposes a model to explore the demand of various systems within a VF and their coordination with other assets within the ADN, such as Electric Vehicles (EV s) and photovoltaic (PV) systems. To this end, a framework to procure the optimal operation schedule of VF s under demand and solar generation uncertainties with convexified AC power flow constraints is presented. It is shown that the proposed framework also enhances the dispatchability of renewable Distributed Energy Resources (DER s). The formulated two-stage robust optimization problem is reformulated as a Mixed-Integer Second-Order Cone Programming (MISOCP) problem to be solved by reliable off-the-shelf solvers. It is shown that the demand response of VF s can mitigate the carbon emissions of the electricity and agriculture sectors by up to 70% and decrease the operation cost of the electricity network by 10% for the IEEE-33 bus system compared to utilizing an inflexible schedule for VF s.