End-use sector coupling to turn customer plants into prosumers of electricity and gas

Abstract

The overall climate change commitments require integrating energy systems belonging to various economic sectors to decarbonize them. Cities offer great potential to couple electricity and gas vectors using the available infrastructure, thus protecting the environment. This paper analyses the electricity and gas distribution grids together for the first time. It focuses on the issues related to an extended rooftop Photovoltaic installation on each Customer Plant, evaluating the exploitation of the electricity surplus through a holistic approach in two different ways: injection back into the electricity grid or production of Synthetic Natural Gas and injection into the Natural Gas grid. The goal is to evaluate if voltage or pressure limit violations occur in the respective grids. Results show that injecting electricity surplus back into the Low Voltage grid can create voltage problems, while technical limitations shown by the alternative solution are much lower. Another advantage of the gas network is the possibility of exploiting the linepack effect, i.e., the pipeline storage capacity, which increases supply flexibility without using any storage appliance.