Abstract Energy and global climate change crises are correlated issues since energy generation currently contributes to nearly 40% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and inevitably the escalating energy demand realization… Click to show full abstract
Abstract Energy and global climate change crises are correlated issues since energy generation currently contributes to nearly 40% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and inevitably the escalating energy demand realization exacerbates the ongoing undesirable circumstances. As a viable solution against the concerns above, microgrid deployments with low-emission on-site resources have been receiving increasing attention from power decision-makers. Thus, this study scrutinizes the technical and financial sustainability of deploying a net-zero emission multi-carrier microgrid and determines the optimal generation configurations. Besides, the proposed emission-neutral multi-carrier microgrid model provides insights into the economic prominence of renewable energy incentives together with regulations for the short-term deployment of green resources. The objective of the proposed model is to minimize the multi-carrier microgrid deployment costs associated with the investment, operation, maintenance, energy demand shifting, monthly peak demand charge, emission, and reliability. Furthermore, load prioritization and a novel demand shifting of demand response schemes are propounded to maintain at least the continuous flow of energy for high-prioritized loads. The customer multi-carrier microgrid deployment problem is disintegrated into an investment master problem and an operation subproblem. The results indicate that notable electrical peak mitigation of about 7–23% is procured by employing the demand response scheme. Furthermore, the sensitivity analysis illustrates that renewable penetration of 30% along with dispatchable resources is required to procure the targeted share of green resources within microgrids. Finally, the economic and environmental merits of the proposed emission-neutral multi-carrier microgrid are ensured with savings and the discounted payback period of 131% and 3.977 years, respectively.
               
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