Communication-efficient distributed electricity and carbon allowance management for community microgrids with hybrid energy supply stations

With the rapid development of plug-in electric vehicles and hydrogen fuel vehicles, the introduction of hybrid energy supply stations into modern energy systems has attracted much attention in recent years. The hybrid energy supply stations are promising energy facilities that can provide charging services for plug-in electric vehicles and refilling services for hydrogen fuel vehicles. This paper studies electricity and carbon allowance sharing among community microgrids integrated with hybrid energy supply stations from a new perspective. The main objective of this work is to reduce the communication overheads when implementing distributed energy and carbon allowance management for microgrids, rather than merely protecting the privacy of microgrids as other studies have done. Thus, a communication-censored alternating direction method of multipliers-based communication-efficient distributed algorithm is proposed for solving the electricity and carbon allowance sharing problem in a distributed manner. Moreover, an adaptive penalty coefficient selection method is introduced and integrated into the communication-censored alternating direction method of multipliers for improving the convergence performance of the distributed algorithm. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed mechanisms for sharing electricity and carbon allowance among microgrids can result in a 50.18% reduction in the total operation cost and a 13.70% reduction in the total carbon emissions, compared to the scenario where such sharing is not implemented. In comparison to the alternating direction method of multipliers, the proposed distributed algorithm can reduce the total communication overhead by 46.47%. Furthermore, the adaptive penalty coefficient selection method can improve the convergence performance of the communication-censored alternating direction method of multipliers by 21.26%.