Modeling of a hydrogen storage wind plant for model predictive control management strategies

The intermittent nature of wind energy combined with the penalty deviations adopted in several electricity regulation markets explains the difficulty of this clean energy in playing a major role in the energy system. Coupling the wind farm with advanced energy storage systems represents, in principle, a good solution for these problems. To date, several researches have been conducted on storage technology, but the problem of finding the best ESS solution is still open. Indeed, every storage technology has its own constraints and limitations in terms of capital cost, response time, operational, maintenance and degradation issues. This highlights the importance of advanced control algorithms for energy storage management systems to mitigate the problems outlined. In this paper, we model a hydrogen-based energy storage system in terms of operating constraints and cost/degradation features. Via a MPC based controller and mixed-integer linear constraints and dynamics, we address the problem of satisfying a forecasted power demand. The paper collects the preliminary ideas for the EU-FCH 2 JU (European Union Fuel Cells and Hydrogen 2 Joint Undertaking) founded project HAEOLUS aiming at building and integrating advanced control strategies for a hydrogen based ESS within a wind farm fence. Numerical simulations corroborate the feasibility and the effectiveness of the proposed approach.