Development of the Hydrogen Supply Chain to Support a CCHP plant with PV Overproduction

This paper presents an optimal management strategy of energy flows for a Combined Cooling Heat and Power (CCHP) plant with a substantial over production from photovoltaic through an hydrogen storage system. The scope is to show how to support an industrial application of “green” hydrogen from an energy management and decarbonisation standpoint. A black-box model investigates the chemical-physical characteristics of the energy and mass balances of the main hydrogen production techniques the results are compared and validated by the literature. A real case study on a dairy firm consuming electricity, heat and cooling energy is investigated and an optimized energy management is proposed for the development of the hydrogen value chain. The final configuration consists of a CCHP plant with a Hydrogen-based Energy Storage System (HbESS), sized differently (M1, M2, M3). From results green hydrogen allows excellent savings in terms of carbon reduction and economics in summer and winter time, while a slight increase in terms of primary and final energy savings are expected in summer.