Potential of environmentally friendly energy hubs with hydrogen and thermal storage devices on the voltage and temperature regulation in energy networks

An energy hub is a unit that coordinates and integrates different resources, storage devices, and loads, which can manage several types of energy simultaneously. Its optimal energy management can improve the environmental and technical factors of various energy networks. Therefore, this study presents the energy scheduling of environmentally friendly energy hubs including renewable wind, solar, and bio-waste resources, and thermal and hydrogen storage devices in electrical and thermal distribution networks. In the proposed system, the hydrogen storage and bio-waste system include a combined heat and power system. Therefore, they also play a role in heating energy production. The proposed design minimizes the sum of the voltage profile function in the electrical network and the temperature profile function in the heating network. This objective function is subject to the optimal power flow equations and environmental constraints of the aforementioned energy networks, and the resource and storage device exploitation model in the form of an energy hub. In this design, uncertainties such as load and renewable phenomena are considered through stochastic programming. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach in improving both environmental and technical outcomes for thermal and electrical networks through improved energy hub management. Incorporating renewable hubs with advanced storage units has notably enhanced conditions across key indicators: voltage profile (47% to 56% improvement), temperature profile (38% to 40%), energy losses (38.10%), and peak load carrying capacity (23% to 40%), compared to traditional load distribution analyses.