Synergistic Operation of Electricity and Natural Gas Networks via ADMM

The increasing growth in the installation of natural-gas fired units has raised necessitates on synergy between the electricity and natural gas networks. This paper discusses how synergistic operation of electricity and natural gas networks can be achieved in a distributed fashion using alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). A standard ADMM approach and a consensus-based ADMM approach are developed, respectively, to solve the gas-electric integrated optimal power flow problem with and without a coordination operator. In both cases, the optimization formulation for each operator is modeled, and the solution procedure as well as data exchange among multiple decision-makers are explained. Case studies on both small and large gas-electric integrated systems show that the two ADMM-based distributed approaches have significant efficiencies over the traditional Lagrange relaxation (LR) and augmented LR-based methods.