Float-O-Voltaics For Green Hydrogen: Design of an Integrated Floating Photovoltaic-to-Hydrogen Production Complex in the Balearic Sea

Abstract

Spain has emerged as one of the EU's most strategically positioned countries for the clean energy transition, particularly through its ambitious energy decarbonization goals to increase its installed renewable energy capacity and hydrogen production. In the midst of increasingly limited physical capacity for land-based clean energy developments and concerns for hard-to-abate industries that require energy-dense fuels, floating photovoltaic (FPV) systems co-located with green hydrogen production present a compelling pathway towards simultaneously advancing both these solar deployment and hydrogen production goals. As such, this thesis presents a preliminary design for a novel FPV-to-hydrogen production complex in the Balearic Sea, co-located with the Barcelona-Marseille sub-sea pipeline of the European Hydrogen Backbone, a developing hydrogen pipeline network in the EU. The design basis is the production of 1 tonne of hydrogen per day during peak summer conditions, with an emphasis on modularity for scalability. The design methodology is driven by the system's total energy consumption of the hydrogen production chain, which encompasses direct seawater intake pumping, a multi-stage water purification treatment, electrolysis, and compression to size and design the appropriate FPV array. From this, the array was modeled on HelioScope to generate hourly (8,760) electricity production data for a MATLAB energy management system simulation to model hydrogen production across daily, weekly, seasonal, and annual scales, as well as to inform the optimal battery energy storage system (BESS) sizing. Secondary structural idealization and financial analyses were conducted to further assess the technical feasibility and economic viability of the proposed design, respectively. The final design is an 11.25 MW FPV array with a 5.5 MWh BESS that produces an annual total of 237.8 tonnes of hydrogen, for a levelized cost of hydrogen of €19.87/kg. The results provide a basis for future feasibility studies on the deployment of FPV-to-hydrogen systems as a unique solution for energy decarbonization.