Distributionally Robust Coordinated Road-Waterway Hydrogen Transport for Low-Carbon Energy Supply in Smart Cities

This paper proposes a distributionally robust coordinated road-waterway hydrogen transport strategy to enhance the utilization of remote renewable energy sources (RESs) for low-carbon energy supply in cities. In this strategy, solid-state hydrogen storage serves as an intermediary to transport RESs from remote regions to meet the energy demand of urban hydrogen energy storage systems (HESSs). Moreover, a renewable-to-hydrogen production control method that integrates dynamic programming is developed to suppress the output ripple of conventional two-stage single-phase inverters, enhancing both the energy conversion efficiency and the production rate of green hydrogen for stable shipping transportation. A road-waterway hydrogen distribution routing and scheduling model is developed to guarantee a precise spatio-temporal match between hydrogen supply and demand of HESSs. The coordinated road-waterway hydrogen transport optimization problem is formulated as a two-stage distributionally robust optimization problem to cope with uncertainties of hydrogen demands. Comparative results have validated the superior performance of the proposed strategy in enhancing remote RES accommodation and improving the stability of low-carbon energy supply for cities. © 2025 IEEE.