Energies, Vol. 18, Pages 6534: Collaborative Operation of Rural Integrated Energy Systems and Agri-Product Supply Chains

Energies, Vol. 18, Pages 6534: Collaborative Operation of Rural Integrated Energy Systems and Agri-Product Supply Chains

Energies doi: 10.3390/en18246534

Authors:
Shicheng Wang
Xiaoqing Yang
Shuang Bai

The high energy consumption characteristics across all segments of the agricultural supply chain, coupled with rural areas’ excessive reliance on traditional power grids and fossil fuel-based energy supply models, not only result in persistently high energy utilization costs and low efficiency but also inflict ongoing negative environmental impacts. This undermines sustainable development and the achievement of energy security. In response, this paper proposes a multi-timescale robust operation scheme for the coordinated operation of rural integrated energy systems and agricultural supply chains. Its core components are as follows: (1) Establish a collaborative operation framework integrating renewable energy-based rural integrated energy systems with agricultural supply chains; (2) Holistically consider energy consumption characteristics across supply chain segments, leveraging sensor-based environmental parameters for crop yield forecasting and hourly energy consumption assessment. This effectively addresses misalignments between crop growth and energy optimization scheduling, as well as inconsistent energy measurement scales across supply chain segments, thereby advancing agricultural sustainability; (3) Introducing a two-stage robust optimization model to quantify the impact of environmental uncertainty on the collaborative framework and integrated energy system, ensuring optimal operation of supply chain equipment under worst-case conditions; (4) Identifying critical energy consumption nodes in the supply chain through system performance analysis and revealing optimization potential in the collaborative mechanism, enabling flexible load shifting and cross-temporal energy allocation. Simulation results demonstrate that this coordinated operation scheme enables dynamic estimation and optimization of crop growth and energy consumption, reducing system operating costs while enhancing supply chain reliability and renewable energy integration capacity. The two-stage robust optimization mechanism effectively strengthens system robustness and adaptability, mitigates the impact of renewable energy output fluctuations, and achieves spatiotemporal optimization of energy allocation.