Influence of Regulation on the Operation of a Hydrogen-Based Energy Storage System Including Economic Model Predictive Control: Use Case of a German Subsidy Scheme

To establish a stable hydrogen economy in Germany, continuously new regulatory schemes for hydrogen systems are developed. Recently, a subsidy scheme was included in the Renewable Energy Act (EEG), which provides boundary conditions for hydrogen-based energy storage systems (HBESSs) design and operation. Therefore, regulation constraints need to be included into technical control to show the actual influence on the operation of the HBESS. This work provides a generic framework to consider economic parameters for power set point assignment of HBESSs and enables the comparison of the different control strategies, rule-based control (RBC) and economic model predictive control (EMPC). The Hydrogen Lab Bremerhaven (HLB) and the EEG serve as use case for the application, which was implemented in MATLAB Simulink. While the revenue was optimized, also the components utilization rate and the grid-supporting operation were evaluated. The economic results show that the new EEG subsidy enables profitable operation of HBESS for the first time, by guaranteeing a use case specific electricity price of 94.81 e/MWh. Also, the supervisory control method is crucial since the EMPC generates higher revenues than a simple RBC. Utilization rates show that by the current subsidy scheme the monetary incentive to store energy is missing. Also, the revenue as objective for the EMPC leads to lower times of grid-supporting operation, compared to the RBC. Overall, the method of including a regulation scheme into technical control for HBESS could be successfully demonstrated.