Curtailment Reduction of Renewable Generations Through Power-to-Hydrogen Opportunities

With the worldwide increasing penetration of renewable power generations, their curtailment rate has also increased owing to several reasons including the lack of transmission capacity, grid congestion limits, and surplus generation during low load hours. Green hydrogen and Power-to-Hydrogen (PtH) units play an important role in the reduction of renewable power curtailments as well as the reduction of power grid total costs. It is the purpose of this paper to investigate the reduction of renewable generation curtailments via employment of PtH units. Candidate wind farms and PtH units are applied to the modified IEEE 24-bus power system in a 15-year planning scope with an annual load rise of %2. The MILP problem is solved in GAMS software via Gurobi solver and four cases are taken into account based on the hydrogen bid variations and the curtailment penalty changes. It is observed that without utilizing PtH units, there are large amounts of wind power curtailments. However, in the presence of PtH units, the annual curtailments are decreased significantly. Moreover, both the hydrogen bid as well as the curtailment penalty effect the curtailment reduction of renewable-based generations. The higher the hydrogen bids and curtailment penalties, the more the curtailment reductions.