Green hydrogen for public transportation fueling and street lighting electrification: Towards more sustainable Moroccan cities

Abstract

Generally, the energy consumption of public services is associated with considerable greenhouse gas emissions. Hybrid energy systems are widely deployed in several countries in an effort to reduce these emissions. However, despite their proven benefits, developing countries still lack a mainstream implementation of these systems. Therefore, this study presents an assessment of the techno-economic performance and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of different hybrid system configurations for hydrogen and electricity production to satisfy the needs of public transportation and street lighting in three Moroccan cities. These hybrid system configurations mainly contain PV panels, hydrogen electrolyzers and dispensers, and hydrogen and oxygen storage tanks. The main difference between the proposed configurations (i.e., C1 and C2) manifests in the exploitation routes of their produced energy (i.e., hydrogen and electricity) and by-products (i.e., oxygen and heat). The techno-economic results indicate that C2 would only be economically profitable when deployed in midsized cities (internal rate of return (IRR) higher than the discount rate (5 %)), while C1 would not be able to generate profits regardless of the cities' size (IRR < 5 %). Furthermore, the sensitivity analysis underscores the considerable dependence of the financial profitability of the designed systems on their capital costs, income taxes, and hydrogen and oxygen selling prices. Finally, findings show that C2 is able to avoid more GHG emissions compared to C1 (by 17.84 % on average).