Abstract:
The world has embarked on a journey of unleashing the untapped potential of hybrid energy systems to quench the ever-growing thirst for green energy. Being still in its formative stages, Power-to-Gas offers an efficient opportunity to turn renewable energy into "green" hydrogen, establishing an inevitably remunerative spectrum of end-uses. A zesty episode of initiatives announced across the globe that are more yearning, awe-inspiring, and mammoth in size, reflect that it has accomplished substantial inroads in the energy revolution. However, utilizing the produced hydrogen for electricity production is yet ignored. In this spirit, the current paper intends to contribute to the worldwide scientific community by evaluating, from a techno-economic perspective, a hybrid model for sizing hydrogen generation by water electrolysis from renewable energy and using it for electricity production. Modeling of this hybrid system is done using HOMER Pro. Hydrogen is produced using a hybrid energy system and then fed into a hypothetical combined cycle power plant to produce electricity. Hydrogen has economic dominance over batteries in terms of energy storage and cost of energy, as per results. The economic analysis is constructed on
economic parameters like payback period, internal rate of return, cost of energy, and multiple configurations of the system. Four scenarios including a baseline case have been simulated. The most feasible configuration yielded a levelized cost of energy being 0.465 USD/kWh, an internal rate of return being 17.3%, and a payback period of 2.3 years. Renewable energy sources are thoroughly assessed for coupling with the desalination plant and electrolyzer array. This system can further be expanded on a
larger scale to transform the region into a hydrogen hub to produce green, highenergy-density hydrogen to be supplied to and utilized by multiple sectors.
