Exploiting RES for Hydrogen mobility: a new scenario for the company's fleet management

Abstract

Hydrogen aroused a great interest in the last decades as a promising energy vector for the energy transition as well as renewable energy storage. This article investigates the technical feasibility of a hydrogen-powered fleet, in the context of a microgrid with renewable generation. The hydrogen demand is satisfied through the electrolyser powered by local RES and periodical external refueling of a local hydrogen storage system. The model of the microgrid is implemented in the open-source GNU Octave environment and is exploited to size the local storage capacity. Different types of vehicles were considered and hydrogen pressure levels were distinguished among the system components. The model was applied to the waste collection fleet and the headquarters of ASM S.p.A., a utility located in the center of Italy, chosen as a case study. The dataset of 143 vehicles was used to model the hydrogen-powered fleet. Three scenarios were evaluated: hydrogen production using i) Reverse Power Flow, ii) PV production and iii) electricity drown from the grid. The storage capacity depends on the scenarios and in the case study it ranges from about 35 to 47 m3, in comparison with 13.6 m3 of current diesel refueling system, assuming the same frequency of external refueling.