An integrated simulation model for analysing electricity and gas systems

This paper aims at analysing the impacts of interdependencies between electricity and natural gas systems in terms of security of energy supply. When analysing both systems several interdependencies can be observed, however, the most significant interdependencies are as follows: (1) gas dependency of gas fired power plants in electricity system and (2) electric dependency of electric-driven compressors in gas system. Since both systems depend on each other, it is of major interest from an energy security perspective to investigate how failures triggered in either of the systems propagate from one system to the other. We proposed an integrated simulation model that aims at reflecting the dynamics of the systems in case of disruptions and takes the cascading effects of these disruptions into account. While developing the integrated model, first electricity and gas systems are modelled separately and then linked by an (MATLAB-based) interface. The effectiveness of the proposed model is investigated using characteristic disruption scenarios. Computational results demonstrate that the integrated simulation model is very user-friendly and quite effective and efficient in analysing the interactions between electricity and gas systems. (C) 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.