Techno-economic assessment of green hydrogen valley providing multiple end-users

Abstract

A techno-economic analysis of a hydrogen valley is carried out in this paper. A hydrogen generator fed by a wind farm (WF) and/or a photovoltaic (PV) plant supplies four end-users: a stationary fuel cell, a hydrogen refuelling station, the injection in the natural gas pipeline and, in case of sufficient hydrogen surplus, a biological hydrogen methanation (BHM) process.The results demonstrated that an efficiency improvement and a reduction in hydrogen production costs arise from a balanced supply from wind and solar energy. Without the inclusion of a BHM process, hydrogen production costs lower than 7 €/kg were achieved by a hydrogen generator using 10–12% of the PV + WF annual energy with a PV share of 20%–50%. The hydrogen production costs were further reduced to 5 €/kg by introducing a BHM process and increasing the percentage of electrical energy supplied by the PV + WF system to 25% of its overall production.