Power-to-hydrogen storage integrated with rooftop photovoltaic systems and combined heat and power plants

Abstract

The growing share of intermittent renewable energy sources for power generation indicates an increasing demand for flexibility in the energy system. Energy storage technologies ensure a balance between demand and supply and increase the system flexibility. This study investigates increased application of renewable energy resources at a regional scale. Power-to-gas storage that interacts with a large-scale rooftop photovoltaic system is added to a regional energy system dominated by combined heat and power plants. The study addresses the influence of the storage system on the production planning of the combined heat and power plants and the system flexibility. The system is modeled and the product costs are optimized using the Mixed Integer Linear Programming method, as well as considering the effects on CO2 emissions and power import into the regional system. The optimization model is investigated by developing different scenarios for the capacity and cost of the storage system. The results indicate that the proposed storage system increases the system flexibility and can reduce power imports and the marginal emissions by around 53%, compared with the current energy system. There is a potential to convert a large amount of excess power to hydrogen and store it in the system. However, because of low efficiency, a fuel cell cannot significantly contribute to power regeneration from the stored hydrogen. Therefore, for about 70% of the year, the power is imported to the optimized system to compensate the power shortfalls rather than to use the fuel cell.