Integrated sizing and scheduling of an off-grid integrated energy system for an isolated renewable energy hydrogen refueling station

Abstract

When designing an isolated renewable energy hydrogen refueling station (HRS), it is important to consider the electrical, heating and cooling demands of the supporting building as it is crucial for maintaining the stable HRS operation. Therefore, this paper proposed a new structure of off-grid integrated energy system (OIES) for an isolated renewable energy HRS, which can meet the hydrogen load of the market and the three kinds of loads of the supporting building. The OIES in question consists of wind generators, PV panels, batteries, electrolyzers, heat storage tanks, hydrogen tanks, and absorption chillers. A mixed integer quadratic constrained programming (MIQCP) model of the OIES is built based on the minimization of the total life cycle cost (TLCC). It is built to obtain the optimal solution for sizing and the equipment units’ scheduling strategy. To accord with the actual situation, the electrical, heating, and cooling loads of the supporting building in the simulation are obtained by the EnergyPlus software. Furthermore, the ‘community’ hydrogen demand is obtained by the HOMER software. The results indicate that the proposed structure meets a wide array of energy demands and is more sensible solution when compared to other configurations with one component less. In addition, sensitivity analyses of the influence of economic data, meteorological data, and hydrogen load on TLCC are performed. These results show that the capital and replacement cost of the PV panels are the major economic factors influencing the TLCC. They also confirm that the PV is the system’s main component due to a high correlation between the hourly hydrogen demand per year and the hourly solar radiation per year. Lastly, the effects of meteorological data and hydrogen load are also quantitatively analyzed.