Forecast-driven economic co-transition of renewable-rich urban energy hubs with eco-friendly transport-based storage systems under political–social welfare in future-ready smart cities

Achieving an urban energy transition that is both economically efficient and socially inclusive remains a previously unresolved challenge, particularly under high renewable penetration and growing electrified mobility. Existing studies have addressed multi-energy hubs and storage integration, yet the coordinated role of transport-based storage under explicit political–social welfare constraints has remained insufficiently established. Here, a forecast-driven economic co-transition framework is developed for renewable-rich urban energy communities, explicitly coupling energy hubs with eco-friendly transport-based storage systems to resolve this limitation. The framework was formulated as a scenario-based mixed-integer linear programming model that co-optimized electricity, gas, heating, and cooling flows under uncertainty while embedding affordability, equity, and mobility justice constraints. Numerical experiments on a benchmark urban system demonstrate that the proposed approach reduces total operational costs by up to 27 percent relative to a conventional hub baseline, increases renewable energy utilization by more than 31 percent, and lowers peak demand by nearly 24 percent through coordinated demand response and storage dispatch. Transport-based storage further reveals a decisive role, with off-peak charging strategies achieving the highest tariff savings and stochastic charging uncovering a robust balance between cost efficiency and reliability under volatility. Sensitivity analysis establishes that renewable availability and storage sizing exert the strongest influence on system cost, while expanded demand response and mobile storage participation consistently mitigate economic risk. These findings demonstrate that integrating transport-based storage with welfare-aware optimization provides a new framework for aligning urban decarbonization.