Demand response potential evaluation of a zero carbon hydrogen metallurgy system considering shaft furnace's flexibility
This work addresses the flexibility gap in power systems for the ironmaking industry, offering an incremental improvement in demand-side management.
The paper tackles the problem of evaluating demand response potential in a zero-carbon hydrogen metallurgy system by modeling shaft furnace flexibility, resulting in a 6.6% reduction in operating costs compared to baseline methods.
The increasing penetration of intermittent renewable energy sources and the retirement of thermal units have widened the power system flexibility gap. Industrial demand response (DR) driven by real-time pricing is widely regarded as a viable solution. In this paper, we propose a framework to quantify the DR potential of a zero-carbon hydrogen metallurgy system (ZCHMS) considering shaft furnace's flexibility. First, we model the shaft furnace as a constrained flexible load and validate the model via simulation, achieving a root mean square error of 4.48\% of the rated load. Second, we formulate a DR potential evaluation method that determines baseline and DR-based production scheduling schemes by minimizing operating cost subject to production orders. Finally, the numerical results show that compared with the baseline, DR-based ZCHMS reduces operating cost by 6.6\%, incentivizing demand-side management in ironmaking and strengthening power-ironmaking synergies.