1. Introduction
Green hydrogen, produced through renewable energy-powered electrolysis, is expected to play an important role in achieving full decarbonisation of today’s energy system. Producing green hydrogen provides a means for energy storage and adds to flexibility, especially in energy systems with high renewable power penetration [
1]. In electricity networks, green hydrogen can support the grid integration of renewable energy sources (RES), which are intermittent and varying in nature [
2]. Green hydrogen can also assist in the decarbonisation and electrification of heating, by meeting future seasonal energy storage requirements [
3]. Furthermore, sectors that are difficult to electrify, such as long distance heavy-duty transport, the chemical industry, iron & steel manufacturing and the heat sector could benefit from using green hydrogen to decarbonise [
1,
4,
5]. Today, green hydrogen production is virtually zero worldwide, but various countries are starting to make it a strategic priority. In the UK, for example, the recent Energy Security Strategy portrays a clear support for green hydrogen. The strategy aims to have up to 10 GW of hydrogen by 2030, with at least half of this being from electrolysis [
6].
Recent years have seen a significant expansion in offshore wind capacity world wide, with a large increase in capacity expected in the coming decades [
7,
8]. In the UK, for example, the government’s ambition is to have 50 GW of offshore wind by 2030 [
6] and between 75 GW and 140 GW by 2050 [
9,
10], building from a 2022 base of about 23 GW of operational and consented capacity [
11]. Considering both the push for green hydrogen and the expansion of offshore wind capacity, green hydrogen produced from offshore wind power is likely to be an important part of the world’s energy future. Producing green hydrogen would be a viable option especially in areas with a high offshore wind resource and a significant hydrogen demand, but where the electricity networks have severe constraints.
One of the main challenges facing green hydrogen is the high costs currently associated with electrolysis. Currently, more than 98 % of the world’s hydrogen production is sourced from fossil fuels, mostly from natural gas (76 %) but also from coal (22 %) [
12]. This is down to cost - before the invasion of Ukraine, hydrogen manufactured through low carbon electrolysis (i.e. nuclear and wind) cost more than double any other alternative [
12]. If a viable green hydrogen industry is to emerge from the current global production of 88 Mt per year of fossil-fuel based hydrogen and grow to enable a net zero world, which may require as much as 2.3 Gt per year [
3], the production of green hydrogen must be cost competitive.
In order to accelerate the cost reduction of green hydrogen, recent literature is increasingly proposing to connect offshore wind farms directly to offshore electrolysers. For example, [
13] undertakes a techno-economic feasibility study of an offshore wind-powered electrolyser for ship refuelling purposes, with a payback time of up to 11 years. The cost modelling includes the wind farm, electrolyser, water treatment and liquefaction plant. An overview on the integration of electrolysers offshore is provided in [
14], which highlights the benefits of hydrogen for grid balancing services such as frequency control; and also [
2], which undertakes a techno-economic study of onshore and offshore electrolysers. More specifically, [
2] compares three different electrolyser and offshore wind farm configurations: a single centralised onshore electrolyser, a single centralised offshore electrolyser on its own platform, and multiple distributed electrolysers where each electrolyser is integrated with one wind turbine. The offshore electrolysers were found to be the most cost-effective option.
The above mentioned papers on offshore electrolysis [
2,
13,
14] have favoured proton exchange membrane (PEM) electrolysers over alternatives such as alkaline electrolysers. This is because PEM electrolysers are capable of faster responses to load changes and are relatively compact machines with high current densities. They also do not require a concentrated corrosive alkaline electrolyte [
15], and have slightly lower operational temperatures relative to other technologies. This makes them appropriate for offshore applications were space is limited, electrical generation can fluctuate greatly, and safety is paramount. However, there are aspects of the technology that can be improved.
One potential improvement for PEM electrolysers is their relatively poor durability [
16]. To better understand the degradation of electrolysers connected to RES, [
17] subjects a PEM electrolyser to fluctuating power supplies by alternating high and low current densities. This resulted in accelerated degradation of the electrolyser compared to the control electrolyser (which was subjected to steady conditions). The main cause of performance loss is the result of increased high frequency resistance caused by parasitic contact resistance between cell components. If the conductivity is compromised, the electrolyser performance is reduced. The degradation of PEM electrolysers when subjected to fluctuating renewable energy sources is also outlined in [
18].
Battery systems can help to reduce the rate of electrolyser degradation by reducing the rate of change in power experienced by the electrolyser and balancing power mismatch. Additionally, they can help with controlling the DC link voltage between the wind farm and the electrolyser and with black start of the wind turbine or wind farm. However, battery systems are also prone to degradation, especially when subjected to high levels of cycling at very high or very low charge levels [
19]. Furthermore, introducing batteries will add to the wind farm costs, especially if they degrade quickly and require regular replacement. Hence, if the required capacity of the batteries or the number of charge and discharge cycles can be reduced, the cost of hydrogen could potentially be reduced.
A typical modern wind turbine controller has the primary aim of maximising power capture below a set rated wind speed via changes to the generator torque and maintaining the rated power above the set rated wind speed via the blade pitch actuators. Often this goal has constraints on the maximum (rated) rotor speed, with the rated rotor speed maintained via a Proportional Integral (PI) controller. The secondary goal is to keep any structural and component mechanical loads within an acceptable range to achieve a set design life. There is typically minimal consideration of the rate of change of power during operation. Hence, in below rated operation, particularly at rated rotor speed, the power output of a wind turbine can change rapidly. As an example, the NREL 5 MW wind turbine [
20], operating using the controller described in [
21], can output changes in power as rapid as 1 MW/s during power production in the below rated power, constant speed region. It is clear that there is a disconnect between the smooth power requirements of an electrolyser and the typical power output of a variable speed pitch regulated wind turbine. If the wind turbine and electrolyser were attached to the electrical grid then the difference between the power output by the turbine and input to the electrolyser could simply be exported to the grid. In the case of a green hydrogen system without a grid connection then some other solution must be found.
As turbine size has increased, the amount of inertial energy stored in the rotor has likewise risen. Using estimates that account for technological innovation as well as increasing size of turbines [
22], a power law exponent of 3.14 for the energy stored in the blades is calculated. The rotor could potentially be used as an energy store, increasing rotor speeds when reduced electrical power output is required and decreasing rotor speeds when increased electrical power output is required. Whilst care must be taken when altering the operational strategy of a turbine, the idea of increasing or decreasing the rotor speed to store or release energy is not new [
23,
24], though it has typically been suggested as a means of providing synthetic inertia. Assuming an acceptable change in the rotor/generator speed of
, the NREL 5 MW wind turbine can store/release approximately 6.4 MJ (1.78 kWh) of energy. If used appropriately, a controller could be designed at either a wind turbine or a wind farm level to use the energy stored in the rotor to smooth the power output of a wind turbine and hence reduce the cost of the required battery storage when producing green hydrogen without a grid connection. Such a controller is the focus of the work presented here.
To summarise, this paper presents a proof of concept for novel control methods to smooth the active power of wind turbines and wind farms, connected in an off-grid fashion to a battery and an electrolyser. The active power smoothing has the overall aim of reducing battery costs by either increasing battery lifetime for a given battery size or reducing battery size for a given lifetime. This is a means of reducing the Levelised Cost of Energy (LCOE) of green hydrogen production by wind turbines with no grid connection. To be clear, the LCOE impacts are not quantified in this work. Also not under consideration is the modelling of electrolyser degradation. Both could form the basis of future work. The results presented here focus on changes in battery lifetime and/or battery sizing. The detailed implementation of the necessary wind turbine and wind farm control methodologies is beyond the scope of this work and is suggested as future work. The methodology for simulating the idealised control action and analysing the results and the models for the wind turbines, electrolyser, and battery used in the work are detailed in
Section 2. The specific case studies to be assessed are presented in
Section 3. The results and discussions are presented in
Section 4, and conclusions presented in
Section 6.
4. Results
The first result considered is the smoothing effect of increasing the size of the wind farm itself on battery capacity.
Figure 10 compares the number of operating years that could be achieved by the average battery capacity per 5 MW of wind power between different wind farm sizes with and without WFC. For both the WFC and no control (NC) cases, the increase of the wind farm size is shown to not only extend the battery lifetime given the same average battery capacity, but also reduce the minimum average battery capacity that would meet all the energy required until the retention limit. This result is as expected, as increasing the number of turbines naturally smooths the power of the wind farm. The stochastic variations in wind resource from turbulence experienced by different turbines cancel one another out to a greater extent as the number of turbines increases.
For batteries with an expected lifetime of 15 years, the WFC-based average battery capacity per 5 MW wind turbine is decreased by around 65 % from 1.7 MWh to 0.6 MWh when the wind farm scale increases from 1 x 5 MW wind turbine to 16 x 5 MW wind turbines.
Next, the impact of WFC on battery lifetime can be considered.
Figure 11 compares the number of years that batteries of different energy capacities could operate, for a wind farm of 1, 4, 9 or 16 x 5 MW wind turbines when no control (NC), wind farm control (WFC), supervisory control (SC) or both (SC+WFC) are applied. WFC to smooth the required energy output of the batteries leads to longer battery lifetimes given the same battery capacity than the NC case, showing that the use of the WFC greatly alleviates the battery degradation. For a wind farm of 16 x 5 MW wind turbines, batteries with a lifetime of 15 years (which require one replacement over a typical 25-year wind farm lifetime with some safety margin) have approximately a 30 % reduction in required capacity (reduced from from 14 MWh to 10 MWh).
Finally, the minimum battery capacity that allows the batteries to meet all the energy requirements and last until the retention limit (i.e. the minimum size of the battery regardless of lifetime) can also be considered. For the NC and WFC cases, the minimum battery size is 0.04 MWh, 0.06 MWh, 0.12 MWh, or 0.15 MWh for each wind farm size respectively. This is reduced to 0.01 MWh in all cases by the SC due to the significant reduction in the energy required from batteries. However, the increased number of discharge/charge cycles due to the use of the SC accelerates the battery capacity fading, which reduces the lifetime of the batteries, as shown in
Figure 11. It is worth noting that the supervisory controller used here is tuned in a heuristic manner and so the tuning is unlikely to be optimal. However, it is logical that the supervisory control would reduce the lifetime whilst also reducing the minimum battery size, as SC must by necessity introduce additional charge cycles, reducing lifetime, but will keep the battery SoC more optimal during use. It is likely that, with improved tuning, the SC+WFC) lifetime could be positioned between the WFC and NC lifetimes in
Figure 11 whilst facilitating smaller minimum battery sizes. Note that the near equality of the NC and SC+WFC) results in the results shown is coincidental.
5. Discussion
The results presented in
Section 4 show that WFC can be used to increase battery life for a wind farm used for hydrogen electrolysis without a grid connection. The results considering wind farm size imply that, as wind farms get larger, the natural smoothing that results will have a positive effect on battery lifetime. However, there is likely still an advantage to smoothing power through WFC for large wind farms, and, given that implementation of a control algorithm is very cheap compared to the cost of the wind farm, even small benefits are useful. Further, it is likely that the first wind farms to power electrolysis without a grid connection will be small, within the sizes of wind farms considered here, as developers would be unlikely to want to risk the large cost of a very large wind farm prior to wider acceptance of the concept. Hence, WFC for smoothing power could be a valuable tool in reducing LCOE.
This paper presented a proof of concept, and demonstrated that the smoothing of wind farm power output by a wind farm controller can have a significant impact on battery lifetime and/or sizing for wind farms without grid connections used for hydrogen electrolysis. This proof of concept opens up a range of potential future work.
The work presented here does not attempt to quantify the impact of the control approach on the LCOE of a wind farm. Cost analyses are complex, and the impact of increased battery lifetime and/or reduced required battery size is not a simple calculation. For example, optimal battery sizing is directly linked to the O&M strategy, which is in turn highly dependent upon the detailed turbine design, the distance to shore, and a range of other factors. By including hydrogen production as an income, the financial viability of hydrogen electrolysis powered by wind farms without grid connections could be ascertained. An analysis of this type would be an interesting area for future work.
The control algorithm presented is shown to work here as a proof of concept. Whilst the control method is possible to implement, a full implementation is not presented here. In order for the controller to be tested in the field it needs to be fully implemented in wind farm simulations to show that it is robust across all operating conditions including edge cases. Such an implementation is considered another interesting area for future work.
The battery and electrolyser models used here are representative of current technology and are of sufficient fidelity to produce reliable results of this proof of concept. However, both models could be built upon further to include additional variables pertinent to powering electrolysers from wind farms without grid connections. The electrolyser model could be expanded to include degradation, hence expanding the work presented here to include electrolyser lifetime that could feed into a future cost study. It may be possible to "trade-off" electrolyser and battery life by varying the smoothing of the power by the battery (after the wind farm smoothing). The battery model (and a future electrolyser model with degradation included) could have a thermal model added to account for temperature changes.
Finally, the production of hydrogen could be increased by optimising the number of operational stacks at any given time. This would require further development of electrolyser supervisory control.
6. Conclusions
Producing green hydrogen from electrolysers directly connected to offshore wind turbines, with no grid connection, may play an important role in the future. Without any remedial control, wind turbine power is highly variable and is not ideal for electrolysers. A battery can be used to smooth the power. The battery’s lifetime is dependent upon its charge cycles and so the smoother the input power to the battery the greater its lifetime. Larger wind farms naturally smooth the power output more than smaller wind farms through averaging of the stochastic variation. For batteries with an expected lifetime of 15 years, the WFC-based average battery capacity per 5 MW wind turbine is decreased by around 65 % from 1.7 MWh to 0.6 MWh when the wind farm scale increases from 1 x 5 MW wind turbine to 16 x 5 MW wind turbines.
WFC can further smooth the power of wind farms to facilitate direct electrolysis of hydrogen, increasing battery lifetime for a given battery size and hence facilitating the use of smaller, less costly batteries. For example, for a wind farm of 16 x 5 MW wind turbines, batteries with a lifetime of 15 years (which require one replacement over a typical 25-year wind farm lifetime with some safety margin) have approximately a 30 % reduction in required capacity (reduced from from 14 MWh to 10 MWh).
Whilst supervisory control can reduce the minimum size of battery (disregarding lifetime), it necessarily introduces additional charge cycles, impacting lifetime. Supervisory control must therefore be carefully tuned.
Future work could include:
A full implementation of the WFC and supervisory controller
Further study in the tuning of the supervisory controller gain
Further development of the electrolyser model to include degradation
Further development of the battery model to include thermal considerations
A LCOE analysis of wind to hydrogen with no grid connection
Author Contributions
“Conceptualization, A.S, M.C, and M.K.; methodology, A.S., M.C, M.K, A.N., and F.F.; software, A.S, M.C, M.K., and F.F.; validation, A.S., M.C, and F.F.; formal analysis, A.S., M.C, and F.F.; investigation, A.S., M.C, and F.F.; resources, A.S; data curation, M.C and F.F.; writing—original draft preparation, A.S., M.K, A.N., and F.F.; writing—review and editing, A.S, M. K, J.F, and A.N. ; visualization, M.C, F.F. and B.P.; supervision, A.S, and D.C.; project administration, A.S. and M.S.; funding acquisition, A.S, and D.C. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.”, please turn to the
CRediT taxonomy for the term explanation. Authorship must be limited to those who have contributed substantially to the work reported.