4E comprehensive comparison and optimization of different renewable power sources for green hydrogen production

In the future, hydrogen will be a crucial energy source for sustainable development, and green hydrogen production using renewable energy resources has become popular. In the present study, four renewable resources (solar, biomass, geothermal and wind energies) are used for power generation, and the produced power is transmitted to a proton exchange membrane electrolyzer (PEME) for green hydrogen production. The waste energy recovery in all configurations is done by a thermoelectric generator. 4E (energy, exergy, exergy-economic, and environmental) analysis is done on the proposed systems by a parametric study and design optimization. Considering 328 kW of input power to PEME in the base case, the results demonstrate that in the best performance mode, the biomass-based system has the best exergy efficiency of 13.39 %, while the geothermal-based system leads to the best exergy-economic performance with a total cost rate and unit cost of 23.37 $/h and 29.81 $/GJ, respectively; however, in this case, the geothermal system exergy efficiency is equal to 7.53 %.