Integration of green hydrogen generation in the MIBEL, a long-term analysis

Abstract

Nowadays, one of the major challenges of industry is reaching sustainability and decreasing greenhouse effect emissions. In this decarbonization context, recent studies have analysed the role of hydrogen. Depending on their obtention method and their CO2 emissions, different production methods exist leading to the so-called grey, blue, and green hydrogen. In this framework, green hydrogen, which comes from electrolysis, stands out since is expected to reduce CO2 emissions.

However, there are some questions about the viability of green hydrogen to be solved. In this paper the penetration of green hydrogen from renewable sources in the MIBEL electricity market is studied. To this aim, a quadratic programming model with linear constraints that minimizes the total system cost is proposed. The model considers an hourly representation in a yearly horizon for an adequate representation of renewable and demand dispatches.

The paper presents case studies where the model has been tested. Its main inputs have been tuned according to the Spanish Hydrogen Strategy and independent studies. The main results show that, under some reasonable assumptions, the price of electricity rises due to electrolysers, increasing in some cases the CO2 emissions, questioning the benefits of hydrogen integration. Regarding the hydrogen dispatch, a lack of capacity is shown, encouraging a revision of the plan proposed by the Spanish government. Other sensibilities have been carried out by varying the capacity of renewable sources. Expected conditions leads to a utility factor of the electrolysers about 16 increasing up to 50 when a large penetration of renewables was tested.