Hydrogen produced using renewable energy will help lower Australia’s emissions, drive a booming export industry, and help replace fossil fuels in some energy-intensive sectors like heavy freight transport and industries such as steel and fertiliser manufacture. Australia has a significant opportunity to become a ‘green’ or ‘renewable’ hydrogen powerhouse.
The challenge
Existing limitations with the present renewable energy alternating current (AC) microgrids for green hydrogen generation include low efficiency, high cost and size.
This project focusses on the transition from AC to fully DC microgrids for green hydrogen production. Innovation toward direct current (DC) systems is difficult and significantly hampered by the lack of industry experience with dedicated DC microgrids for green hydrogen.
The solution
This project uses an efficient, first-of-a-kind fully DC microgrid for green hydrogen production, using electrolysers, solar photovoltaic (PV) generators and battery energy storage systems.
In this microgrid, the unnecessary AC/DC and DC/AC power conversions have been eliminated via dedicated DC-DC power converters for electrolyser, PV and battery storage systems.
The outcome
This advance provides the key experiences for the industry in design, operation, and control of DC microgrids for hydrogen production, enabling a faster uptake and upscaling of green hydrogen.
The impact
Several experiments assessed the maximum power point tracking (MPPT) performance of the designed control system as well as the overall efficiencies at various solar irradiances which confirmed the optimal performance of the planned DC microgrid, with approximately 10% increase in power efficiency over its AC counterpart.
This research project demonstrates the removal of unnecessary AC power conversion stages in the future renewable-based microgrids, to achieve higher efficiency and flexibility.
Next steps
This research is the first step towards the fully DC “power to gas – gas to power” systems with high efficiency.
The Fully DC Microgrid for Green Hydrogen Production project is a two year collaboration between Horizon Power, Origin Energy Limited, QLD Government Department of State Development, Infrastructure, Local Government and Planning and Queensland University of Technology.
Partners
Project researchers
- Dr Saman Asghari Gorji
- Dr Dezso Sera
Project status
Complete