Assessment of an integrated energy system embedded with power-to-gas plant

As the rapid increase of electricity consumption combined with the issue of restricted fossil fuels in recent years, renewable energy generation has been actively developed, particularly in form of wind power generation. However, due to the limited penetration into local power grid, a large proportion of renewable power production has to be curtailed or directly wasted. To solve this problem, Power-to-Gas technology, the process whereby the surplus wind power generation is used to produce hydrogen and synthetic natural gas (SNG), has absorbed high attention recently. The existing natural gas network could potentially be used as a means to store, transport and reutilize SNG production, thus prevent its waste. In this paper, an integrated energy system embedded with Power-to-Gas plant (IES-PtG) is presented. As a market participant, natural gas company implements a Power-to-Gas plant, and purchases surplus renewable electricity from a topographically remote wind farm and transports SNG production to the demand centers through gas pipelines. To demonstrate the energy performance and economic feasibility, the proposed system is evaluated in comparison with a conventional separation production (SP) system. The simulation results show the significant energy saving, running cost saving and the investment feasibility.