An Economic Performance Improving and Analysis for Offshore Wind Farm-Based Islanded Green Hydrogen System

Abstract

When offshore wind farms are connected to a hydrogen plant with dedicated transmission lines, for example, high-voltage direct current, the fluctuation of wind speed will influence the efficiency of the alkaline electrolyzer and deteriorate the techno-economic performance. To overcome this issue, firstly, an additional heating process is adopted to achieve insulation for the alkaline solution when power generated by wind farms is below the alkaline electrolyzer minimum power threshold, while the alkaline electrolyzer overload feature is used to generate hydrogen when wind power is at its peak. Then, a simplified piecewise model-based alkaline electrolyzer techno-economic analysis model is proposed. The improved economic performance of the islanded green hydrogen system with the proposed operation strategy is verified based on the wind speed data set simulation generated by the Weibull distribution. Lastly, the sensitivity of the total return on investment to wind speed parameters was investigated, and an islanded green hydrogen system capacity allocation based on the proposed analysis model was conducted. The simulation result shows the total energy utilization increased from 62.0768% to 72.5419%, and the return on investment increased from 5.1303%/month to 5.9581%/month when the proposed control strategy is adopted.