Stock, A.; Cole, M.; Kervyn, M.; Fan, F.; Ferguson, J.; Nambiar, A.; Pepper, B.; Smailes, M.; Campos-Gaona, D. Wind Farm Control for Improved Battery Lifetime in Green Hydrogen Systems without a Grid Connection. Energies2023, 16, 5181.
Stock, A.; Cole, M.; Kervyn, M.; Fan, F.; Ferguson, J.; Nambiar, A.; Pepper, B.; Smailes, M.; Campos-Gaona, D. Wind Farm Control for Improved Battery Lifetime in Green Hydrogen Systems without a Grid Connection. Energies 2023, 16, 5181.
Stock, A.; Cole, M.; Kervyn, M.; Fan, F.; Ferguson, J.; Nambiar, A.; Pepper, B.; Smailes, M.; Campos-Gaona, D. Wind Farm Control for Improved Battery Lifetime in Green Hydrogen Systems without a Grid Connection. Energies2023, 16, 5181.
Stock, A.; Cole, M.; Kervyn, M.; Fan, F.; Ferguson, J.; Nambiar, A.; Pepper, B.; Smailes, M.; Campos-Gaona, D. Wind Farm Control for Improved Battery Lifetime in Green Hydrogen Systems without a Grid Connection. Energies 2023, 16, 5181.
Abstract
Green hydrogen is likely to play an important role in meeting the net zero targets of countries around the globe. Hence, producing green hydrogen cheaply and effectively is an important area of research. One potential option for green hydrogen production is to run electrolysers directly from offshore wind turbines, with no grid connection and hence no expensive cabling to shore. The removal of the grid presents an unusual integration challenge. The variable nature of wind turbines and farms results in a power output that can fluctuate more quickly than the electrolyser’s ability to respond without significantly stressing the electrolyser. Thus, the use of a battery, with the wind farm, becomes essential to even out some of the power variations that the electrolyser cannot deal with. In this work, a proof of concept of a wind farm control methodology designed to reduce variability in wind farm active power output is presented. Smoothing the power supplied by the wind farm to the battery reduces the size and number of battery charge cycles and helps to increase battery lifetime. Considering off-grid wind farms which exclusively power an electrolyser, this work quantifies the impact of the wind farm control method on battery lifetime for wind farms of 1, 4, 9 and 16 wind turbines. This is achieved using suitable wind farm, battery and electrolyser models. As an example, for the largest wind farm studied, consisting of 16 x 5 MW wind turbines, batteries with a lifetime of 15 years have approximately a 30 % reduction in required capacity (reduced from 14 MWh to 10 MWh) compared to operating without wind farm control. It is found that reducing the variability of the active power output of wind farms through the wind farm control methodology presented can have a significant impact on battery degradation and hence on battery lifetime. Hence, wind farm control can reduce the required battery capacity for a given lifetime or it can increase the lifetime of a given battery capacity. The work presented shows that wind farm control could play a critical role in reducing the levelised cost of green hydrogen produced from wind farms with no grid connection and paves the way for the design and testing of a full implementation of the wind farm control.
Keywords
wind farm control; green hydrogen; electrolysis; battery lifetime; wind turbine control
Subject
Engineering, Energy and Fuel Technology
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
,
,
,
