Techno-Economic Analysis of Photovoltaic-Hydrogen Fuel Cell/Pumped Hydro Storage System for Micro Grid Applications: Case Study in Cyprus

Abstract

Renewable energy resources such as solar resources are suitable alternatives for the use of fossil fuels as they are abundant, can be harnessed in affordable ways and are considered environmentally friendly. However, renewable energy resources fluctuate with time which decreases the matching between the energy produced by the renewable energy system and the demand and also decreases the reliability of the power supply. There are several potential ways to increase the matching and reliability of renewable energy systems such as the hybridization of renewable energy resources and the integration of energy storage. A techno-economic analysis of different configurations of Photovoltaic, Hydrogen Fuel Cell (HFC) and Pumped Hydro Storage (PHS) is carried out where Middle East Technical University Northern Cyprus Campus (METU NCC) is the case study. The optimal configurations of the PV system with different energy storage system configurations for the university are found based on maximizing the renewable energy (RES) fraction with Levelized Cost of Electricity (LCOE) equals to the grid tariff. However, the objective of the optimization becomes the maximization of the RES fraction with the minimum LCOE if there is no a feasible configuration. The results show that the integration of HFC and PHS system with the PV system increases the RES fraction and the demand-supply fraction from 36.2% to 45.4% and from 23.9% to 35.1%, respectively. The proposed system consists of 2.57 MW PV, 1.16 MWh HFC and 4.14 MWh PHS where such a system has LCOE of 0.181 USD/kWh.