jailcd2020071: A Review of Uncertainty Characterization Approaches on the Input Side of Distributed Energy Systems

Abstract

The distributed energy systems (DES) have been widely used. However, the design process of DES can be affected by various uncertainties from both input side and output side, which can lead to a suboptimal design decision. To avoid this impact, uncertainty characterization (UC) must be regard as a crucial step in the process of DES design. For the previous researches, there are hardly uncertainties involved in the design of DES. Besides, the current studies mainly focus on the uncertainties on the output side. While on the input side, the stochastic nature of renewable energy and energy price can also have significant influence on the design result. The main aim of this paper is to investigate uncertain parameters on the resource side of an energy system and review the approaches used in the literature to characterize their uncertainty. Specially, the uncertain parameters discussed in this paper are the availability of renewable energy (wind and solar) and the price of energy carriers in a DES. By the analysis of the variety and the different complexity levels of the approaches used for UC by different researchers, this review hopes to assist the future researchers to consider uncertainty in their DES design models.