Optimal stochastic short-term thermal and electrical operation of fuel cell/photovoltaic/battery/grid hybrid energy system in the presence of demand response program

•On-grid photovoltaic/battery/fuel cell system is considered as hybrid system.•Thermal and electrical operation of hybrid energy system is studied.•Hybrid energy system is used to reduce dependency on upstream grid for load serving.•Demand response program is proposed to manage the electrical load.•Demand response program is proposed to reduce hybrid energy system’s operation cost. In this paper, cost-efficient operation problem of photovoltaic/battery/fuel cell hybrid energy system has been evaluated in the presence of demand response program. Each load curve has off-peak, mid and peak time periods in which the energy prices are different. Demand response program transfers some amount of load from peak periods to other periods to flatten the load curve and minimize total cost. So, the main goal is to meet the energy demand and propose a cost-efficient approach to minimize system’s total cost including system’s electrical cost and thermal cost and the revenue from exporting power to the upstream grid. A battery has been utilized as an electrical energy storage system and a heat storage tank is used as a thermal energy storage system to save energy in off-peak and mid-peak hours and then supply load in peak hours which leads to reduction of cost. The proposed cost-efficient operation problem of photovoltaic/battery/fuel cell hybrid energy system is modeled by a mixed-integer linear program and solved by General algebraic modeling system optimization software under CPLEX solver. Two case studies are investigated to show the effects of demand response program on reduction of total cost.