Energy demand is closely related to energy price, GDP and population. By using the shortest path algorithm and K-means clustering, we set up the spatial nodes, and carried out the model simulation to predict the energy demand of Yunnan Province. The results show that the total energy consumption of Yunnan Province will still show an upward trend from 2020 to 2015; hydropower silicon integration projects in Yunnan Province, the power supply and demand situation in Yunnan Province will change from oversupply to basic balance between supply and demand, and the role of thermal power in dry season will be played to make the decline of coal consumption tend to be smooth; from 2020 to 2025, Yunnan’s electricity consumption will increase by about 8.02% year-on-year. However, according to the commissioning of some projects, the total electricity consumption in the province will be about 192.9 billion kwh in 2020, with a yearon-year increase of 12.3%.

Against the backdrop of China’s “carbon peaking and carbon neutrality” goals, the abundant renewable resources in rural areas offer natural advantages for developing distributed integrated energy systems. However, the economic feasibility of advanced technologies such as carbon capture and hydrogen energy storage in rural applications requires further evaluation. This paper proposes a rural integrated energy system (RIES) architecture that integrates hydrogen energy storage and carbon cycling, encompassing six types of energy and material carriers—electricity, heat, gas, hydrogen, carbon, and biomass—and establishes a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model aimed at minimizing the total annual cost. Taking a typical rural village in northern China as a case study, capacity configuration optimization is conducted for five technical scenarios, and the impacts of the local generation ratio target, photovoltaic (PV) curtailment penalty coefficient, hydrogen storage efficiency, hydrogen energy subsidies, and equipment investment costs are analyzed.The results indicate that the scenario equipped with both carbon cycling and hydrogen storage achieves the lowest total annual cost, approximately 6.8% lower than that of the conventional RIES, with the local generation ratio increasing by about 4.0 percentage points and the PV curtailment rate dropping to 2.2%. Among these, carbon cycling is the primary source of cost reduction, while hydrogen storage further improves local power supply contribution and PV utilization. Sensitivity analysis indicates that increasing the local generation ratio can reduce electricity purchases from the grid, but at the cost of higher equipment investment; the PV curtailment penalty mainly affects PV capacity configuration and the level of PV curtailment, while hydrogen energy efficiency, subsidies, and equipment cost reductions influence the economic attractiveness of hydrogen energy equipment. The findings can provide a reference for the synergistic deployment of carbon cycling and hydrogen storage in RIES.