Hydrogen Production from Optimal Wind-PV Energies Systems

Electrolytic hydrogen offers a promising alternative for long-term energy storage of renewable energies (RE). A stand-alone RE system based on hydrogen production has been developed at the Hydrogen Research Institute and successfully tested for automatic operation with designed control devices. The system is composed of a wind turbine, a photovoltaic (PV) array, an electrolyzer, batteries for buffer energy storage, hydrogen and oxygen storage tanks, a fuel cell, AC and DC loads, power conditioning devices and different sensors. The long-term excess energy with respect to load demand has been sent to the electrolyser for hydrogen production and then the fuel cell has utilised this stored hydrogen to produce electricity when there were insufficient wind and solar energies with respect to load requirements. The RE system components have substantially different voltage-current characteristics and they are integrated on the DC bus through power conditioning devices for optimal operation by using the developed Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT) control method. The experimental results show that the power gain obtained by this method clearly increases the hydrogen production and storage rate from wind-PV systems