Electricity, Heat, and Hydrogen: Optimizing the Daily Operation of a Multi-Utility

This work tackles the day-ahead scheduling of a multi-utility company that seeks to maximize the profits from selling electricity to the market and supplying heat and electricity demand to the clients. The multi-utility owns renewable power and heat power plants and a hydrogen system that integrates an electrolyzer, a storage tank, fuel cells and a turbine. The model is formulated as a two-stage stochastic problem where the first stage represents the day-ahead market and the second stage represents the balancing market. The uncertainty of the availability of the wind and solar power, the electricity demand of the clients, and the electricity prices is modelled through scenarios. Nodal computation is used to solve efficiently the problems. Numerical results based on the North region of Italy are presented.