Large-Scale Hydrogen Regulation in a Coupled Power-Traffic Network for Smart Cities

As the interactions between the power distribution network (PDN) and the urban transportation network (UTN), also known as the coupled power-traffic network (CPTN), are getting more involved in smart cities, the integration of pipeline-consisted hydrogen transportation network (HTN) could lead to extended operating flexibility. This paper proposes a regulation framework on the basis of CPTN that encompasses large-scale regulation of hydrogen production, storage, transportation, and utilization. Specifically, pressure variations across each state of hydrogen regulation are coordinated, thereby optimizing the hydrogen distribution within the system; meanwhile, the energy management strategy for pressure variations at each node is regulated to reduce the energy consumption during pressurization and facilitate potential energy recovery during depressurization. A set of physically representative models and an enhanced heuristic algorithm are integrated to solve the detailed optimization problem; moreover, the enhanced heuristic algorithm, genetic algorithm-hippopotamus optimization (GA-HO) method, is developed to improve both convergence speed and solution quality. Case study shows that the regulation of hydrogen transportation pressure could reduce energy consumption by 59.23% compared to the method only considering the optimization of hydrogen flow, and the energy management within the hydrogen regulation framework could reduce energy consumption by 16.25%. Case study also demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed method in energy consumption decrement, on-site renewable consumption improvement, and operation state enhancement.