Abstract
Renewable Power-to-Gas has spread in European countries since the early 2000s as penetrating variable renewable energies. As an aid to implement the basic hydrogen strategy of Japan, the authors developed a photovoltaic generation (PV)-powered hydrogen production system at a hydrogen refueling station in 2017, and have studied the operation planning and control for improving its capacity factor since then. In this paper, the authors set the operating policy to maximize hydrogen production keeping two cases of environmental criteria (case 2020 and 2030), and propose the operation control to levelize the input power for the PEM-electrolyzer by the grid and the operation planning using weather forecast data on the PV-powered hydrogen production system. Through four one-year operating simulations in each case, the results show that more than one and a half times hydrogen production is available compared to the PV-followed operation control without planning in the case 2020, but only a little increase of hydrogen production is attained under the harder environmental criteria in the case 2030. This results from the higher carbon dioxide emission factor of the power grid in Japan based on the energy mix plan in 2030 as compared to the definition of green hydrogen in the European Union.
