Techno-Economic-Environmental Assessment of Hydrogen Production and Storage Systems with Hybrid Renewable Energy Sources: A Case Study on a Rural Community in India

This research presents a techno-economic assessment of hydrogen production and storage systems (HPSSs) with solar photovoltaic (SPV) systems and a wind farm (WF) located at the Mamatkheda village in India. The proposed system seeks to satisfy the dynamic load demands of different settlements in the area under study. An optimal size of the HPSS is determined using the HOMER Pro software tool based on the geographical data, meteorological data, and monthly energy requirements of the village. The study considers three different configurations namely, base system, SPV-WF-biomass plant (BP), and SPV-WF-HPSS, for detailed study in HOMER Pro with 25 years of lifetime, 8% interest rate, and 2% inflation rate. Later, these configurations are compared based on levelized cost of energy (LCOE), net present cost (NPC), renewable energy fraction (REF), internal rate of return (IRR), return on investment (ROI), simple payback period (SPP), and net carbon emission (NCE). Results demonstrate a significant decrease in SPP from 5.12 years to 1.80 years, when BP gets replaced with HPSS. Although, the LCOE for SPV-WF-HPSS configuration is increased to $0.2302/kWh, the ROI and IRR significantly improves to 54.6% and 51.6%, respectively. Also, due to the reduction in REF from 95.5% to 90.5%, the NCE from the SPV-WF-HPSS configuration increases from 37.38 ton/year to 77.31 ton/year.