Green hydrogen levelized cost assessment from wind energy in Argentina with dispatch constraints

SCHMIDHALTER, IGNACIO; DIEGO, OLIVA; FUENTES MORA, MAUREN; MUSSATI, SERGIO F.; MUSSATI, MIGUEL C.; AGUIRRE, PIO A.

Congreso; WCCE11 11th World Congress of Chemical Engineering; 2023

Asociación Argentina de Ingenieros Químicos

Latin America is one of the geographic regions with the most renewable energy potential to produce green hydrogen and achieve a future with net-zero emissions. The International Energy Agency (IEA) [1] recently produced a report on the potential of low-carbon hydrogen in Latin America, stating that Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Panama, Paraguay, Trinidad and Tobago, and Uruguay are currently preparing national hydrogen strategies. In the literature, fewer articles addressing the model-based feasibility of green hydrogen production in Latin American are found. Given the high wind availability in the South of Argentina, the aim of this work is to further investigate the costeffectiveness of producing green hydrogen in Patagonia. To do this, a model is implemented in EXCEL in order to determine the optimal size of the hydrogen production via electrolysis by using wind energy at minimum value of the levelized cost of hydrogen (LCOH). Three different wind turbines of Class I, II and III are investigated and several geographical locations covering the full surface of the Patagonia are considered through a grid of 80 nodes at 100 km distance. For each location, wind hourly velocities taken from NASA [2] corresponding to the last decade (since 2011 up to 2021) are considered. The hourly net energy delivered by each type of wind turbine is computed form its turbine power curve and the hourly wind velocity.The variability in the wind energy resource and the capacity factor allow making a ranked list of the studied nodes according to each one separately and both combined. In this paper, the variability and capacity factor are computed for each location and for each type of wind turbine and the obtained values are compared to those obtained in other geographical locations of other countries (Australia, Chile, Spain and USA). In addition, useful relationships among the Class of wind turbine, variability of the wind resource and capacity factor are obtained. For a representative year obtained from previous results, the LCOH is computed for each location without considering hydrogen storage which leads to a variable dispatch of hydrogen along the year. Under this scenario, the minimum value of LCOH can be computed as function from both the peak power of the wind farm and peak power of the electrolyzer plant. Whereas the hydrogen production can be computed as the maximum amount that the system can be produced at each hour. The optimal ratio of the Peak Power of the wind farm to the Peak Power of electrolyzer is investigated and its relationship to the variability and capacity factor of the resource are obtained. In addition, the optimal turbine Class for each node is obtained and Patagonia maps depicting several variables are shown.