Optimization study of a hybrid renewable energy system for co-production of electricity and heat at a hydrogen refuelling station

The purpose of this study is to identify the best hybrid renewable energy system (HRES) configuration for a hydrogen refuelling station located in Schleswig, Holstein. Techno-economic analysis and configuration simulations are performed using the Hybrid Optimization of Multiple Energy Resources (HOMER) Pro program. Initially, HRES powered by photovoltaics (PV) and two different wind turbines (WT) are proposed, achieving 100 % renewable fraction. Alternative configurations include a thermal load controller (TLC), a boiler and a micro gas turbine (MGT). The renewable fractions of these configurations are reduced to over 40 %. The best system configuration comprises PV panels, XANT L-36 WT, Vestas V47 WT, hydrogen storage tank, electrolyser, battery, TLC, boiler, and MGT, with net present cost (NPC) of $6.28 million. Furthermore, four regression models are utilized for the econometric evaluation of global green hydrogen production in the R programming language (R). The ridge regression (RR) model demonstrates the best performance, providing a good fit for our data.