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EDITORIAL article

Front. Energy Res., 20 December 2023
Sec. Process and Energy Systems Engineering
This article is part of the Research Topic Muti-Energy Integration towards Energy Decarbonization View all 7 articles

Editorial: Muti-energy integration towards energy decarbonization

Lefeng Shi
Lefeng Shi1*Xinrui ChenXinrui Chen2Rui JingRui Jing3
  • 1National Center for Applied Mathematics in Chongqing, Chongqing Normal University, Chongqing, China
  • 2School of Economics and Management, Chongqing Normal University, Chongqing, China
  • 3College of Energy, Xiamen University, Xiamen, Fujian, China

Global warming and energy resource scarcity caused by the widespread use of fossil fuels are urging humans to transition the current way of life and production into a more environmentally and efficiently sustainable mode. Among the candidates, through electrification, reconstructing various types of energy into a multi-energy system, so as to achieve the comprehensive use of various types of energy and reduce carbon dioxide emission, is a well-recognized feasible idea. Especially recently, with technological progress in fields of renewable energy such as solar and wind, this multi-energy integration model has been drawing significant interest from both practical and academical domains.

The salient difficulty of the multi-energy integration lies in how to harmonize various types of energy sources to achieve a stable power supply like that of a general fossil-powered generator. The back reason comes from the intrinsic operation complications of multi-energy systems. For instance, compared with the common fossil-based generators, multi-energy systems often have more operational goals, which not only contain electricity generation but also include heat supply, the minimization of overall environmental impacts, and others, let alone the lots of randomness of diverse renewable energy that needs to be dealt with.

In order to address the aforementioned challenges of multi-energy systems and utilize their merits, the Research Topic entitled “Multi-Energy Integration towards Energy Decarbonization,” is organized, focusing on, but not limited to, the following issues:

• New concepts and ideas for multi-energy integration;

• New approaches and models of integration toward decarbonization;

• Design and planning of low/zero-carbon multi-energy systems;

• Operation and control methods of coupled energy systems;

• Policy incentives and market mechanisms for energy integration;

• Technical, economic, and environmental systemic analysis;

• Cyber-physical-social integration of energy systems.

Because of its innate stand-alone feature, the island energy system is the most characteristic of all integrated energy systems compared with the inland system. Besides, due to its natural independence from the big continental energy system, it is often an ideal place to test some models before rolling them out in inland areas. Song and Chen took Chongming Island as an example, analyzed the necessity of island energy system transformation, and put forth a possible path and corresponding policies for turning the current energy system to the resilient, which included the orderly construction of hybrid renewable energy systems, and the promotion of distributed power generation and microgrid technology, etc.

Not only island energy systems but in fact, all integrated energy systems should adhere to the principle: full utilization of the potential of all energy sources in the region. The integration process of diverse energies is essentially an optimization issue. Around this thinking, Huang et al. looked at the issue of power-to-chemicals using solar energy, i.e., methane, methanol, and gasoline, through designing a molten-salt solar power tower (MSPT). In their suggested scheme, a bilevel optimization was proposed, which employed mixed-integer linear programming at the lower level for optimal sizes and operating strategies of technologies, and heat cascade use, and employing genetic algorithms at the upper level for optimizing the MSPT design. The relevant results indicate that in the scheme, the MSPT could take the advantage of cheap and massive thermal storage and operate a longer time with the aid of cost-effective and efficient molten-salt thermal storage.

Likewise, through proposing series optimization algorithms, Zhang et al. gave an assembled approach to deal with the impact of wind power on sub-synchronous state stability and the dynamic characteristics of the grid-connected system. This research is instructive in terms of addressing the challenges posed by wind power integration into the grid, particularly in the aspects of the clustering of wind farms and the optimization of controller parameters to enhance system stability. Also concerned with wind power, Kamel et al. discussed the issue of optimal plan of wind turbines and battery energy storage (BES) with regards to smoothing the intermittence of wind power. In addition, another considerable optimization issue for multi-energy system is that of multi-objective optimum scheduling. In the rissuesearch of Zhang et al., a multi-objective optimal dispatching model and the related solving way were developed with the optimization goals of minimizing system operation costs, reducing carbon emissions, and increasing exergy efficiency.

Finally, Wang and Zhang, standing on a macro-perspective, studied the impact of China’s “comprehensive two-child” policy (UTCP) and “three-child” policy (TCP) on the age structure of Chinese families, and how such changes further affect households’ demand for electricity, and proposed a power demand forecasting model considering the impact of the fertility policy. Their forecasting results indicated that, 1) the household-level old-age dependency ratio have a significant suppressive effect on the electricity demand; 2) for households without the pressure of old-age dependency, the China’s “comprehensive two-child” policy’s contribution to electricity demand is significant, while “three-child” policy’s is limited; 3) under China’s “comprehensive two-child” policy and “three-child” policy cannot fundamentally curb the declining trend of residential electricity demand of China in the long term.

Author contributions

LS: Writing–original draft. XC: Writing–review and editing. RJ: Writing–review and editing.

Funding

The author(s) declare financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. The China National Key Research and Development Programme (SQ2023YFA1000183), National Natural Science Foundation of China (12371258), and Chongqing Natural Science Foundation (CSTB2023NSCQ-LZX0037).

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher’s note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Keywords: system integration, energy forecasting, decarbonization, energy system modelling, optimization

Citation: Shi L, Chen X and Jing R (2023) Editorial: Muti-energy integration towards energy decarbonization. Front. Energy Res. 11:1346136. doi: 10.3389/fenrg.2023.1346136

Received: 29 November 2023; Accepted: 11 December 2023;
Published: 20 December 2023.

Edited and reviewed by:

Ellen B. Stechel, Arizona State University, United States

Copyright © 2023 Shi, Chen and Jing. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Lefeng Shi, shilefeng@foxmail.com

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.