Techno-economic evaluation of green hydrogen supply chain integrated with multi-selling strategies

• the innovative hydrogen supply chain is proposed. • the concept of the “sharing economy” into the design of hydrogen supply is proposed. • multiple demands in the transportation and hydrogen metallurgy are considered. • the hydrogen energy flowing is exploited to cover the multi-period demonstration. Hydrogen production from solar energy is an efficient mechanism which would shape a global trade in terms of the commercial prospects. The vehicles and industrial-grade hydrogen constitute two dominant load terminals in which the gap of the corresponding hydrogen pressure reflects the urgent need for differentiated storage levels and multi selling strategies. A hybrid system consisting of a solar PV site, the water electrolysis hydrogen production module, a multi-level storage and diverse selling models is proposed to mitigate this challenge. This study conducts the economic assessment considering the Levelized Cost of Electricity (LCOE), Levelized Cost of Hydrogen (LCOH) and sensitivity analysis under several scenarios. In addition, for the operational cost, the influenced factors functioned by the distance to the car charging stations, the randomness of hydrogen price and potential of fault events are also analyzed. In these three hydrogen generation and selling cases, under the condition of huge scale with the PV plant installed capacity at 5000KW and middle scale with the PV plant installed capacity at 2000KW definition, the positive simulated results of which the Net Present Value(NPV) is 381,743,828$ and 151,912,249$, respectively. The corresponding Internal Rate of Return(IRR) of the two experiments is 11.63% and 16.88%. With the respect to the LCOH index, for the huge-scale, LCOH of three levels which have been defined as 30 bar,350 bar and 700 bar have been 5.08$/kg, 5.56$/kg and 6.52$/kg. The corresponding value in the middle-scale arrived at 8.94$/kg, 9.46$/kg and 10.49$/kg. As for the small scale, the negative results have been gained due to the unsuitable capacities of the core components. Through the analysis of the experimental results, this study addresses key challenges in current green hydrogen supply chains, such as spatial mismatches between hydrogen production and demand, incompatible pressure levels for different end-users, and unclear economic feasibility of different project scales. The proposed multi-level storage and sharing economy-based refueling models enhance the flexibility and cost-effectiveness, while the scale-specific techno-economic results provide direct guidance for practical project planning.