Background, Description, Delivery and Learning Objective: Deploying an entirely green hydrogen plant and optimizing it for lowest levelized cost of hydrogen (LCOH) presents a number of technical challenges. Most renewable sources of energy, like wind and solar, are intermittent and present gaps in generation of varying durations. Natural Power conducted an analysis of an off-grid hydrogen electrolysis system for a potential project in the central United States. The regional solar net capacity factor was approximately 20-23%, and the regional wind net capacity factor was approximately 36-39%. The objective of the analysis was to optimize the size of the wind, solar, and energy storage capacities to achieve the lowest LCOH.
Typical year 8760’s for the wind and solar resources were determined while maintaining the hourly relationship between the wind and solar resources over the 20-year timeseries dataset. Once the resource 8760’s were finalized, they were used to calculate the available supply energy for hydrogen production at hourly intervals. Based on the available energy supply, the model then calculated the hourly hydrogen production for over 3,000 scenarios of different wind, solar, and energy storage capacity combinations. The LCOH was calculated for each scenario based on expected capital expenditures, fixed operating costs, and variable operating costs for the combined wind, solar, and hydrogen production pieces of the project.
Intended Audience: hydrogen developers, investors, industry consultants
