Optimal Hydrogen Production Dispatch of Networked Hydrogen-Based Microgrids via a Distributed Method

Hydrogen has drawn significant attention due to its long-term storage capability and wide industrial applications. How to efficiently utilize renewable energy to maximize hydrogen production of a group of spatially distributed electrolyzers is a fundamental problem urgently needed to be solved. This paper is the first to attempt to address the problem by proposing a hydrogen production dispatch (HPD) model for hydrogen-based microgrids with proton exchange membrane electrolyzers. Considering the limited communication and privacy requirement of distributed energy systems, a distributed hydrogen production dispatch framework is constructed. The original nonconvex optimization problem is transformed into a convex form. Furthermore, it is proven that the marginal hydrogen production benefit of each electrolyzer should be equal for the optimal hydrogen production dispatch via Lagrangian duality. By setting the marginal hydrogen production benefit as a consensus variable, a novel distributed consensus-based dispatch algorithm is developed, in which an event-triggered communication scheme is introduced to alleviate the communication burden. It is demonstrated that the proposed algorithm achieves linear convergence. Results of the case study indicate that the proposed strategy yields the optimal hydrogen production benefit, which is increased by 9.43% compared to on-site hydrogen production and demonstrates excellent solving efficiency especially for large-scale systems.