Distribution Locational Marginal Emission for Carbon Alleviation in Distribution Networks: Formulation, Calculation, and Implication

Regulating the proper carbon-aware intervention policy is one of the keys to emission alleviation in the distribution network, whose basis lies in effectively attributing the emission responsibility using emission factors. This paper establishes the distribution locational marginal emission (DLME) to calculate the marginal change of emission from the marginal change of both active and reactive load demand for incentivizing carbon alleviation. It first formulates the day-head distribution network scheduling model based on the second-order cone program (SOCP). The emission propagation and responsibility are analyzed from demand to supply to system emission. Considering the complex and implicit mapping of the SOCP-based scheduling model, the implicit theorem is leveraged to exploit the optimal condition of SOCP. The corresponding SOCP-based implicit derivation approach is proposed to calculate the DLMEs effectively in a model-based way. Comprehensive numerical studies are conducted to verify the superiority of the proposed method by comparing its calculation efficacy to the conventional marginal estimation approach, assessing its effectiveness in carbon alleviation with comparison to the average emission factors, and evaluating its carbon alleviation ability of reactive DLME. Note to Practitioners—This paper proposes the novel distribution locational marginal emission (DLME) to calculate the marginal change of emission from the marginal change of both active and reactive load demand for incentivizing carbon alleviation in the distribution network. The proposed SOCP-based implicit derivation approach calculates the DLMEs effectively in a model-based way. The DLME can incentivize effective demand response for carbon alleviation in the distribution network. The proposed method can be applied to the distribution network management for carbon alleviation and emission reduction. We conduct case studies to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method in various distribution networks under various scenarios. Numerical results show that the proposed DLME can enhance 10%-200% of the carbon alleviation effectiveness compared to the average emission factors.