REPOSITORY > RESULTS

Abstract

This dissertation combines academic research and the application of its results to a real benchmark process.
With the emerging electro-energetic systems that have a large share of renewable sources, hydrogen is becoming an important energy carrier that contributes to the storage and usage of surplus green energy and thus reduces air pollution, climate change and can be used as a feedstock in a variety of industrial processes. Therefore, hydrogen production from renewable energy sources (known as green hydrogen) is important where a hydropower plant, as the most stable renewable electrical energy source, can play an important role. But today’s green-hydrogen production is barely economically viable due to the current price of technological equipment for its production, which is not yet mass produced. This prevents green-hydrogen technologies from being widely adopted.
The basic aims of the dissertation are to address the potential for green-hydrogen production in a run-of-river hydropower plant during its regular operation and an evaluation of the economics of the cogeneration of electricity and hydrogen. The hypothesis is that the development of an appropriate decision-support tool can lead to a better hydrogen-system design and its inclusion in a hydropower plant for green-hydrogen production. Namely, the proper sizing of the equipment by simultaneously taking into account the available water resources and the techno-economic aspects (e.g., current electricity prices, the selling price of hydrogen) leads toward a better selection of the hydrogen system’s components. It is expected that the developed decision-support tool will contribute to (i) efficient simulation scenarios for the evaluation of the techno-economic aspects of the hydrogen system’s operation, (ii) a reduction of the investment costs for the hydrogen system’s installation, (iii) lowering the hydrogen-production costs and (iv) increasing the financial sustainability of investment in a hydrogen system.
To verify the hypothesis, in the first part of the dissertation we developed a model of the hydropower plant’s operation, the model of the hydrogen system and the economic model, which describes the link between the equipment type and size, on one hand, and related capital investment costs (CapEx) and operating costs (OpEx) on the other. The economic model also estimates the resulting costs of hydrogen production and the economic outcome of the operation of the entire system. These models were used to set up the simulation environment in a MATLAB/Simulink programming platform to conduct the various simulation runs and present the simulation results.
In the second part of the dissertation, we demonstrate the use of the developed models and the simulation environment in the evaluation of various scenarios for hydrogen production in the case-study hydropower plant. We demonstrated that the use of this tool helps to reduce the investment costs for the installation of a hydrogen system, to lower the production price of hydrogen and to make the investment in a hydrogen system profitable.