A full-time scale energy management and battery size optimization for off-grid renewable power to hydrogen systems: A battery energy storage-based grid-forming case in Inner Mongolian

TL;DR

This paper presents a comprehensive energy management and battery sizing strategy for off-grid renewable-to-hydrogen systems, optimizing costs and ensuring stable operation through a detailed control and simulation approach.

Contribution

It introduces a full-time scale EMS and an iterative algorithm for battery sizing tailored to renewable hydrogen systems with a practical case study in Inner Mongolia.

Findings

Optimized battery capacity is 3.4 MWh, representing 13.6% of total source capacity.

The proposed EMS maintains system stability and high-precision hydrogen production.

Levelized cost of hydrogen increases with slower electrolysis power regulation.

Abstract

Hydrogen plays an important role in the context of global carbon reduction. For an off-grid renewable power to hydrogen system (OReP2HS), a grid-forming (GFM) source is essential to provide frequency and voltage references. Here, we take battery works as a GFM source, and the OReP2HS we focus on is comprised of solar photovoltaic, wind turbines, and alkaline electrolyzers for hydrogen generation. An elaborative full-time scale energy management strategy (EMS) covers GFM control to system scheduling (from milliseconds to hours) and is proposed to support high-precision production simulations. Loads of electrolysers are designed to track the renewable power closely to partly replace the energy balancing requirement of the battery. A continuous operation strategy during an emergency like a unit drop is also included in the presented EMS. An off-line simulation-based iterative searching algorithm is developed to find the most suitable size of the battery with the minimum levelized cost of hydrogen (LCOH). A practical OReP2H project located in Inner Mongolian, China is taken as a case study. Simulation results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed method, and the optimized capacity of the battery (3.4MWh) only accounts for 13.6% of the total installed capacity of the sources with the proposed EMS. Sensitivity analysis shows that LOCH rises from 28.829 CYN/kg to 37.814 CYN/kg, with the time-step for fast power regulation of electrolysers changing from 4s to 1 min with a ramp rate of 0.05MW/s.