A Residential Energy Hub Model with a Concentrating Solar Power Plant and Electric Vehicles

Renewable energy generation and electric vehicles (EVs) have attracted much attention in the past decade due to increasingly serious environmental problems as well as less and less fossil energy reserves. Moreover, the forms of energy utilization are changing with the development of information technology and energy technology. The term “energy hub” has been introduced to represent an entity with the capability of energy production, conversion and storage. A residential quarter energy-hub-optimization model including a concentrating solar power (CSP) unit is proposed in this work, with solar energy and electricity as its inputs to supply thermal and electrical demands, and the operating objective is to minimize the involved operation costs. The optimization model is a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) problem. Demand side management (DSM) is next implemented by modeling shiftable electrical loads such as EVs and washers, as well as flexible thermal loads such as hot water. Finally, the developed optimization model is solved with the commercial CPLEX solver based on the YALMIP/MATLAB toolbox, and sample examples are provided for demonstrating the features of the proposed method.