Simulation, economic and environmental evaluations of green solar parking (refueling station) for fuel cell vehicle

Abstract

Energy storage is needed for renewable systems due to the intermittent nature of wind and solar energy. Hydrogen can be used to store variable renewable energy such as solar and wind energy. According to this fact, there is an increasing interest in use of solar-hydrogen systems for power supply in remote areas or other standalone applications. One of these applications is Hydrogen production station working by solar energy to use in fuel cell vehicle. Time consuming aspect of solar-hydrogen production is the most prominent reason for presenting a new scheme as a parking-refueling station for fuel cell vehicles in this study. To do this, Simulation, economic and environmental evaluations of the solar parking-refueling station are considered in this article. Because of using an independent hydrogen compression system, the suggested parking-refueling station can be used in a standalone area such as rural and military applications. Results show that the proposed system seems to be economic in present condition. It also illustrates that the Levelized Cost of Product (Km-Passenger) is in a range of 0.15–0.28 US$. Although using the tracker system is not economically efficient, the effect of such a structure is more obvious in the points far from tropical area.