Modeling interconnected national energy systems using an energy hub approach

This paper describes an approach to model interconnected national energy systems using the concept of energy hubs. Each country is modeled as an energy hub, characterized by the national generation infrastructures for heat and electricity, the demand for heat and electricity as well as properties detailing mobility demand. Countries are interconnected via electricity and gas networks, i.e. it is possible to import or export electricity and/or gas. The paper gives a short introduction to the concept of energy hubs and describes the extensions of the concept to account for national multi-carrier energy systems. In a subsequent part the network model is introduced. The different constituents (generation, demand, transmission infrastructures) form an optimization problem, where a numerical solution approach is combined with particle swarm optimization. Furthermore, it is described how the relevant data concerning demand, generation and network infrastructures was obtained. The paper is concluded with three case studies demonstrating the applicability of the proposed approach.