Techno-economic assessment of hydrogen-based energy storage systems in determining the optimal configuration of the nuclear-renewable hybrid energy system

Abstract

Population growth and economic development have significantly increased global energy demand. Hence, it has raised concerns about the increase in the consumption of fossil fuels and climate change. The present work introduced a new approach to using carbon-free energy sources, such as nuclear and renewable, to meet energy demand. The idea of using the Nuclear-Renewable Hybrid Energy System (N-R HES) is suggested as a leading solution that couples a nuclear power plant with renewable energy and hydrogen-based storage systems. For this purpose, using a meta-heuristic method based on Newton's laws, the configuration of the N-R HES is optimized from an economic and reliability point of view. The optimal system is selected from among six cases with different subsystems such as wind turbine, photovoltaic panel, nuclear reactor, electrolysis, fuel cell, and hydrogen storage tank. Furthermore, the performance of hydrogen-based energy storage systems such as high-temperature electrolysis (HTE) and low-temperature electrolysis (LTE) is evaluated from technical and economic aspects. The results of this work showed that using nuclear energy to supply the base load increases the reliability of the system and reduces the loss of power supply probability to zero. More than 70 % of the power is produced by nuclear reactors, which includes more than 80 % of the system costs. The key findings showed that despite HTE's higher efficiency, using LTE as a storage system in N-R HES is more cost-effective. Finally, due to recent developments and the safer design of nuclear reactors, they can play an important role in combination with renewable energies to support carbon-free energy sectors, especially in remote areas, for decades to come.