The role of the hydrogen economy in decarbonising energy supplies – research and development.

Hydrogen as a fuel has the potential to decarbonise heating and transport systems, as well as provide an energy storage mechanism to integrate intermittent renewable sources into our energy systems. The University of South Wales’ (USW) Hydrogen Research and Demonstration Centre has been set up to allow demonstration of hydrogen technologies such as electrolysers, fuel cells and hydrogen vehicle refueling systems, as well as to facilitate research into various aspects of the hydrogen economy.
Hydrogen can offer a number of advantages as an energy vector. For example, hydrogen has cheap energy related storage costs, making it suitable for long term energy storage applications such as power systems balancing and seasonal storage. Modelling and control plays a vital role in hydrogen system integration and applications. At the Hydrogen Centre, there are various research efforts on modelling power generation especially from renewable resources, as well as hydrogen production via water electrolysis and its usage in fuel cell systems. This research has investigated the use of hydrogen to help accommodate wind power by building models of electricity distribution networks and developing optimal power flow methodologies for analysis, finding that hydrogen has the potential to help integrate wind power by offering low cost long term storage. This analysis has been extended to investigate hydrogen’s use as a vehicle fuel to help with grid balancing.
Research on control strategies for the operation of the system is focused, not only at the individual level, for instance for extraction of renewable energy from PV and wind, but also targeted on the supervisory level, in order to develop new power management strategies to coordinate the operation of components and achieve specific requirements such as higher penetration of the renewable energy, or higher system efficiency. The research involves national and international collaborations. Since 2010, the Hydrogen Centre has taken part in a number of research projects, such as the ERDF funded CymruH2Wales, WEST, SOLCER and FLEXIS projects, Innovate UK funded EcoIsland and Niche Vehicle Network projects and the Chinese state grid funded SGRI project. This presentation will provide an overview of the hydrogen economy including current key research areas as well as summarizing USW’s research outputs.
Keywords: hydrogen economy, energy storage, modelling and control

Acknowledgement: The work was supported by the Flexible Integrated Energy Systems (FLEXIS), through the Welsh European Funding Office (WEFO).