Over a few decades, energy system operators have sought to achieve appropriate frameworks based on the water–energy nexus issues due to energy crises and the rapid growth of water demand. In this regard, multi-carrier microgrids (MCMGs) have been widely welcomed to implement water– energy nexus-related strategies to meet local energy and water demands. This paper presents a centralized stochastic optimization strategy for energy transactions in networked MCMGs to exploit the potential capabilities of the promoted energy conversion facilities in meeting electricity, thermal, and water demands at the lowest operating cost. To enhance the flexibility and operational cost of the system under severe uncertainties, the day-ahead scheduling of all individual MCMGs is carried out by a central operator with the consideration of transactive energy management (TEM) strategy and integrated demand response program (DRP). The MCMGs can purchase energy from the electricity and gas markets to supply demands and energize local generation resources, and also exchange electrical energy with each other under the TEM strategy. The uncertainties arising from the renewable power generation, energy demands, water demand, and electricity market prices are applied to the optimization model using a scenario-based method. The proposed strategy is formulated as the mixedinteger nonlinear programming problem and is solved under GAMS software. The effectiveness of the proposed strategy is validated using a test system consisting of three networked MCMGs. According to the obtained results, the central operator can reduce the total operating cost of the networked MCMGs considerably if employing the TEM strategy and integrated DRP.
