Annual Benefit Analysis of Integrating the Seasonal Hydrogen Storage into the Renewable Power Grids

TL;DR

This paper presents an annual scheduling model for energy hubs with seasonal hydrogen storage, demonstrating its potential to reduce costs and curtailments in renewable power grids.

Contribution

It introduces a novel annual scheduling model that optimizes seasonal hydrogen storage integration into coupled power grids, considering intra- and cross-season exchanges.

Findings

Seasonal hydrogen storage reduces annual operation costs.

Hydrogen storage decreases renewable curtailments.

The model effectively captures seasonal variations in grid operation.

Abstract

There has been growing interest in integrating hydrogen storage into power grids with high renewable penetration levels. The economic benefits and power grid reliability are both essential for hydrogen storage integration. In this paper, an annual scheduling model (ASM) for energy hubs (EH) coupled power grids is proposed to investigate the annual benefits of seasonal hydrogen storage (SHS). Each energy hub consists of hydrogen storage, electrolyzers, and fuel cells. The electrical and hydrogen energy can be exchanged on the bus with the energy hub. The physical constraints for both grids and EHs are enforced in ASM. The proposed ASM considers the intra-season daily operation of the EH coupled grids. Four typical daily profiles are used in ASM to represent the grid conditions in four seasons, which reduces the computational burden. Besides, both the intra-season and cross-season hydrogen exchange and storage are modeled in the ASM. Hence, the utilization of hydrogen storage is optimized on a year-round level. Numerical simulations are conducted on the IEEE 24-bus system. The simulation results indicate that seasonal hydrogen storage can effectively save the annual operation cost and reduce renewable curtailments.