Enhancing resilience of emergency heat and power supply via deployment of LNG tube trailers: A mean-risk optimization approach

Abstract

Tube trailers are widely used for distributing liquefied natural gas (LNG) through transportation networks. When a snowstorm occurs in winter, bad weather conditions may cause pipeline blockages and restrict the movement of trailers, leading to an LNG disruption of an islanded integrated energy system (IES). Thus, it is necessary to pre-allocate the trailers and LNG to enhance IES's resilience and support its LNG consumption during a snowstorm. This paper explores the resilience potential of LNG tube trailers and investigates their optimal pre-allocation strategy. At first, the system operation and damages of IES during a snowstorm are modeled. The network reconfiguration helps reconstruct the damaged network, and pre-allocated LNG helps support heat and power supply. Then, risk-averting two-stage stochastic programming is applied to solve the optimal trailer pre-allocation plan. The first stage tries to reduce the cost of LNG consumption and trailer pre-allocation; the second stage tries to avoid losses of heat and electricity loads. Besides, the conditional-value-at-risk is considered in the model to prevent low-probability but heavy-loss-load-shedding events. Note that the proposed model contains many integer variables, making it non-convex and prohibiting duality theory. A penalty-based Gauss–Seidel method is developed to solve this issue. This method decomposes the model into scenario-independent sub-problems that can be solved in parallel and achieve a consistent first-stage decision. The simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of trailer pre-allocation in the IES's resilience enhancement.