A New Architecture of Energy Hubs for Animal Farms with Distributed Energy Resources

This paper presents a new architecture of energy hubs for animal farms considering the availability of energy resources in the farm such as biogas, solar, etc. It is proposed to combine three energy carriers: biogas, heat and electricity into an aggregate system to improve the energy efficiency of the farm. The problem is to determine the optimal allocation of distributed energy resources such as biogas generators, photovoltaics, battery and electric grid, etc. with the objective function is minimizing the total cost of energy hubs, i. e. life cycle cost while subjected to the constraint of heat, electricity and gas demands. The uncertainty of renewable energy is taken into account not only with the daily and monthly variation of the resource but the forecasting error as well. In addition, the sensitivity of the life cycle cost with respect to the price of electricity is analysed in different scenarios. The problem is examined in a case study of a typical pig farm in Northern Vietnam in both cases: with and without the ability to sell the surplus electricity to the grid. The simulation result shows the effectiveness of the proposed energy hub compared to other approaches.