Effect of plant location on the annual performance of a hydrogen production plant based on CeO2 thermochemical cycle

Abstract

In this work, a study of the effect of the plant location in the hydrogen production plant based on ceria thermochemical cycle is presented. This study consists of the analysis of the annual performance of a 1 MWth continuous hydrogen production plant in ten locations along Australia. The analysis was performed by using the model developed by the same authors and presented in SolarPACES 2017 [1]. Overall, the results showed that locating a plant in a sunny area can increase the solar-to-fuel efficiency in around 4% within the locations under investigation. Oppositely to previous works, this work demonstrates that the optical losses together with the annual DNI distribution play the most critical role into obtaining the highest possible efficiency in a solar driven hydrogen production plant.