Low-carbon scheduling of integrated hydrogen transport and energy system

The joint consideration of hydrogen supply chain networks and electric power systems can promote hydrogen-fueled transportation and the penetration of renewable energy. This paper develops a low-carbon scheduling approach for an Integrated Hydrogen Transport and Energy System (IHTES). To reduce carbon emissions, the environmental cost from the hydrogen supply chain network and electric power system is jointly minimized with the operational cost of IHTES. To consider the timeliness of hydrogen deliveries, hydrogen transport via tube trailers is innovatively modeled as an extended vehicle routing problem with time windows, and delays are penalized. The scheduling problem is formulated as a mixed-integer linear programming problem so that it can be efficiently solved using the branch-and-cut method. Case studies illustrate and validate the proposed model, and demonstrate the computational efficiency of our approach. Carbon emissions are reduced by 47.8% when the emission cost is co-optimized with the operational cost. The operational cost of the hydrogen supply chain network is reduced by 7.3% when the timeliness of hydrogen deliveries is modeled.