Impacts of EU Regulation on Green Hydrogen Production and Storage Capacity Design and Operation

Abstract

In European Union green hydrogen production is regulated to guarantee that transition to green energy will really have positive effect on the mitigation of the climate change, and that the integration of hydrogen economy to existing energy system will be as smooth as possible. However, these regulations complicate the optimal design and operation of the hydrogen production. Requirement about one-hour temporal correlation between contracted variable renewable electricity production and green hydrogen production forces to invest in overcapacity of electrolyzers and high-capacity hydrogen storages to buffer variable hydrogen production to smooth supply flow to hydrogen end use processes. This paper explains these issues with a demonstrative example how different design parameters result to the operation performance of the hydrogen production process.