Collaborative Research: Improving Energy Reliability by Co-Optimization Planning for Interdependent Electricity and Natural Gas Infrastructure Systems

电网和天然气网络是美国能源行业的两大基础设施。 它们是独立设计和管理的。然而，由于许多燃煤发电机的计划退役，可再生能源的深入渗透以及商业上可持续的天然气价格，它们的相互作用在过去五年中有所加强。 因此，为了确保环保、可靠和具有成本效益的电力和天然气生产和输送，联合优化这两个系统非常重要。 然而，由于其规模，复杂性和要求/法规，这样的协同优化规划问题是非常具有挑战性的建模和计算方面。 为了应对这一关键挑战，该项目将建立分析决策支持模型，并设计有效的解决方案，以帮助能源行业制定和计算实际规模的协同优化问题。 协同优化规划的有效性和效益将通过一个实际的微电网项目和工业合作来展示和评估。 除了包括博士生在研究和创建教育材料的下一代能源系统规划人员和业务研究人员，具体的项目将设计涉及利用分析/计算工具，以解决真实的能源问题的代表性不足的学生。 以前的研究电力和天然气系统的协同优化规划是有限的，同时也往往忽略了关键的可靠性考虑，关键的随机/不确定因素，或规划问题的长期多阶段性质。 本研究计划将针对这些不足，（1）调查电力和天然气系统之间的关键相互作用，具有不同的时空粒度以及多个规划和操作水平;（2）建立了一组同时考虑多阶段计划时域、具有关键随机/不确定因素的逐时操作细节（3）通过先进的分解策略、强近似方法和有效的混合方法，设计和实现高性能的计算方法和工具;以及（4）通过正在进行的微电网项目和已建立的行业联系，验证、演示和推广已开发的模型和计算工具。

The electricity grid and the natural gas network are two essential infrastructure systems in the U.S. energy industry. They are designed and managed independently. However, because of the planned retirement of many coal-fired generators, the deeper penetration of renewable energy sources, and the commercially sustainable gas price, their interactions have intensified over the last five years. Hence, in order to ensure environmentally friendly, reliable, and cost-effective electricity and gas production and delivery, it is important to jointly optimize these two systems. However, due to their scales, complexities, and requirements/regulations, such a co-optimization planning problem is very challenging in both modeling and computation aspects. To address this critical challenge, this project will build analytical decision support models and design efficient solution methods to aid the energy industry in formulating and computing practical-scale co-optimization problems. The effectiveness and benefit of co-optimization planning will be demonstrated and evaluated through an actual microgrid project and industrial collaborations. In addition to including doctoral students in research and creating educational materials for the next generation energy system planners and operations researchers, concrete projects will be designed to involve underrepresented students on utilizing analytical/computational tools to address real energy problems. Previous research on co-optimization planning of electricity and gas systems is limited, while also often neglecting critical reliability considerations, key random/uncertain factors, or the long-term multi-stage nature of planning problems. This research project will address these shortcomings by (1) investigating key interactions between electricity and gas systems with different spatial-temporal granularities as well as multiple planning and operation levels; (2) building a set of co-optimization planning models that simultaneously consider the multi-stage planning horizon, the hourly chronological operation details with critical random/uncertain factors, and the requirements of long-term reliability and short-term flexibility; (3) designing and implementing high-performance computational methods and tools through advanced decomposition strategies, strong approximation approaches, and effective hybrid methods; and (4) validating, demonstrating, and promoting the developed models and computational tools through an on-going microgrid project and established industry connections.