Enhancing Offshore Wind Integration by Integrated Electricity and Gas Systems With Hydrogen Blending: The Case of Ireland

The offshore wind farm is a pivotal generation component in the decarbonization of energy systems. However, their large capacity and inherent uncertainty pose great challenges for smooth integration into current electricity systems. This paper proposes an offshore wind accommodation scheme that uses the flexibility of integrated electricity and gas systems and hydrogen blending techniques. Firstly, an uncertainty model for offshore wind farm generation is proposed, where a recursive tree-based method is used to improve the modelling efficiency of cumulative wake effects. Then, a distributionally robust chance-constrained operation scheme of hydrogen-blended integrated electricity and gas systems is proposed, to regulate the gas system safety with stochastic hydrogen injection from offshore wind via power-to-gas, as well as variant gas compositions across the gas network. Gas security is modelled as chance constraints for aligning with practical gas safety regulations. A unified affine policy, embedded with tailored sequential convex programming procedures, is developed to handle the high-order nonconvexities in the distributionally robust chance-constrained optimisation problem. Finally, the proposed method is used in the large-scale Ireland Island energy system with real network data. Our results indicate a remarkable improvement of 156.8% in offshore wind accommodation and 64.31% in carbon emission mitigation with the proposed operation strategy. This underscores the crucial role of hydrogen integration in meeting Ireland's decarbonization ambitions by 2050.