Battery and Hydrogen Energy Storage Control in a Smart Energy Network with Flexible Energy Demand using Deep Reinforcement Learning

TL;DR

This paper presents a deep reinforcement learning control strategy for a hybrid battery and hydrogen energy storage system in smart energy networks, significantly improving renewable utilization, reducing costs, and lowering carbon emissions.

Contribution

It introduces a model-free multi-agent deep deterministic policy gradient approach for real-time energy storage and demand management in smart grids, outperforming existing algorithms.

Findings

Reduces carbon emissions by 78.69%

Improves cost savings by 23.5%

Increases renewable energy utilization by over 13.2%

Abstract

Smart energy networks provide for an effective means to accommodate high penetrations of variable renewable energy sources like solar and wind, which are key for deep decarbonisation of energy production. However, given the variability of the renewables as well as the energy demand, it is imperative to develop effective control and energy storage schemes to manage the variable energy generation and achieve desired system economics and environmental goals. In this paper, we introduce a hybrid energy storage system composed of battery and hydrogen energy storage to handle the uncertainties related to electricity prices, renewable energy production and consumption. We aim to improve renewable energy utilisation and minimise energy costs and carbon emissions while ensuring energy reliability and stability within the network. To achieve this, we propose a multi-agent deep deterministic policy gradient approach, which is a deep reinforcement learning-based control strategy to optimise the scheduling of the hybrid energy storage system and energy demand in real-time. The proposed approach is model-free and does not require explicit knowledge and rigorous mathematical models of the smart energy network environment. Simulation results based on real-world data show that: (i) integration and optimised operation of the hybrid energy storage system and energy demand reduces carbon emissions by 78.69%, improves cost savings by 23.5% and renewable energy utilisation by over 13.2% compared to other baseline models and (ii) the proposed algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art self-learning algorithms like deep-Q network.