Machine learning-driven energy management of a hybrid nuclear-wind-solar-desalination plant

The ongoing energy transition and incoming water scarcity crisis demand coordinated research to ensure a fossil-free future for humankind. Aiming to increase energy efficiency, reduce curtailment and decarbonize water production, this paper proposes a novel energy management system (EMS) for a hybrid plant compound by a small modular nuclear reactor acting as cogeneration unit, a wind and solar farms as generators. Additionally reverse osmosis and multi-stage flash desalination plants are included as demand responsive units along with a freshwater storage. Mixed integer linear programming (MILP) is employed to formulate this stochastic optimization problem, where piecewise linear functions define operational costs and efficiencies of SMR and desalination motivating energy efficiency and safety. Renewable availability point forecasts are obtained with physics informed machine learning models whose error is characterised by fitting the predictor's residuals to different statistical distributions following an unsupervised methodology. The suitability of the EMS is addressed in two study cases, one exploring the flexibility exploitation of the algorithm and another proving its suitability for real-time implementation. The dispatcher manages to keep unaltered the SMR's core reaction while satisfying both electrical and water demand in different renewable availability regimes by fully exploiting sector coupling flexibility. Simultaneously, renewable curtailment is kept to a minimum.