Optimal dispatch of multiple interconnected-integrated energy systems considering multi-energy interaction and aggregated demand response for multiple stakeholders

Abstract This paper investigates the balancing and scheduling of integrated energy systems (IESs) spanning across geographically adjacent areas and regions that involve multiple energy vectors and multiple stakeholders. This is through an extremely complex problem to be formulated and solved, often leading to enormous technical and economic benefit if the synergies among different energy vectors and the aggregated demand response (ADR) are fully utilized. To achieve the objective, a multiple interconnected-integrated energy systems (MI-IESs) model based on energy interaction is first established to capture the coupling relationship between different energy vectors. Then, an ADR mechanism is proposed based on centralized dispatching by the IES operator (IESO) and distribution coordination of IESs, and further assisted with a dynamic interactive pricing mechanism based on load time distribution and renewable energy consumption level. To optimize the operation of such a complex energy system, the MI-IESs model is first decoupled, then an adaptive step size regularized alternating direction multiplier method (AR-ADMM) is proposed to solve the energy dispatch problem, while the information privacy of each IES is also preserved. The simulation results show that the proposed scheduling method can reduce the energy purchase cost of MI-IESs by 1.48% and increase the profit of the IESO by 30.41%. Therefore, the proposed scheduling strategy can not only effectively balance the benefits of individual IES and MI-IESs, but also achieve a win-win situation between MI-IESs and the IESO, and the adopted solution algorithm protects the data privacy of MI-IESs. Furthermore, the solution time of the proposed AR-ADMM algorithm is 13% less than that of the conventional ADMM (C-ADMM) algorithm.