2026-04-17T07:01:26Zhttps://recercat.cat/oai/request
oai:recercat.cat:2117/3958082026-01-22T03:16:23Zcom_2072_1033col_2072_452950
RECERCAT author Samende, Cephas author Fan, Zhong author Cao, Jun author Espinoza, Renzo Fabián author Baltas, Gregory Nicholas author Rodríguez Cortés, Pedro 2023-09-22 Smart energy networks provide an effective means to accommodate high penetrations of variable renewable energy sources like solar and wind, which are key for the 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 reduce carbon emissions by 78.69%, improve cost savings by 23.5%, and improve 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 the deep-Q network.This work was supported by the Smart Energy Network Demonstrator project (grant ref. 32R16P00706) funded by ERDF and BEIS. This work is also supported by the EPSRC EnergyREV project (EP/S031863/1) and the Horizon Europe project i-STENTORE (101096787) and FNR CORE project LEAP (17042283). This research received no external funding.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version) http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Open Access Attribution 4.0 International Àrees temàtiques de la UPC::Energies::Recursos energètics renovables Àrees temàtiques de la UPC::Informàtica::Intel·ligència artificial Reinforcement learning Renewable energy sources Energy storage Carbon Deep reinforcement learning Multi-agent deep deterministic policy gradient Battery and hydrogen energy storage systems Decarbonisation Renewable energy Carbon emissions Deep-Q network Aprenentatge profund Energies renovables Energia -- Emmagatzematge Carboni Battery and hydrogen energy storage control in a smart energy network with flexible energy demand using deep reinforcement learning Article