Comparative Analysis of Hydrogen Production Systems: Offshore, Onshore, and Solar Case Studies

The large-scale energy storage is one of the main challenges of the utilization of the renewable sources. Hydrogen is considered to be a promising solution to this issue. However, the integration of the hydrogen plant systems into the renewable energy parks needs to be optimized, i.e. to produce the maximum amount of hydrogen at the minimum levelized cost of hydrogen (LCOH). A techno economic modeling of the hydrogen systems, including electrolyzer, compressor and tank, is presented. In addition, bi-objective optimization algorithm is used to optimize the systems sizing and energy management using batteries as buffer storage and based on frequency separation strategy. The study showed that the minimum LCOH can be defined after a bi-objective optimization, allowing the sizing optimization to be performed without knowing all the electrical source costs. The approach is tested in four different sites and different source technologies with different capacity factor. Moreover, the impact of the input profile nature on the techno-economic results and the system sizing is investigated. Based on the finding, the energy cost (LCOE) has a significant influence on the minimum LCOH. One of the conclusions is that the offshore technology despite its high load factor, does not compensate its high LCOE compared to onshore technology.