Study of a DC Micro-Gird Configuration to Produce Hydrogen (DCMG-H2)

In this paper, the configuration of a cutting-edge DC Micro-Grid system to produce Hydrogen (DCMG-H2) from Renewable Energy Sources (RESs) is described. Towards that aim, first, the practical insight on preferring a DCMG to an AC Micro-Grid (ACMG) system is elucidated. This analysis clearly highlights the unnecessary power conversions in an ACMG in practice, when the system can be converted to a DCMG. Next, based on eliminating these AC-DC converter components from ACMG, an efficient fully DCMG system is introduced that contains DC loads, such as electrolysers, and Photovoltaic (PV) and Battery Energy Storage (BES) systems. The proposed investigations can significantly address the new technical demand for implementing DCMG-H2 using the low-cost energy from PVs and can enable up-scaling of hydrogen production. The performance of the proposed DCMG configuration is verified by presenting the 24 hours simulation results of a similar real-world network.