Assessment of the Contribution of Power-To-Hydrogen to the Flexibility of the Future European Energy System

Abstract

The European Commission is planning to become climate-neutral by 2050. At the power sector level, this implies turning to renewable sources such as PV panels and wind turbines. However, the intermittence of variable renewable sources is making this task more complex and putting at risk the power sector security of supply. Coupling sectors is a solution to that problem. In particular, power-to-hydrogen is getting more and more attention. This is about using electricity when it is abundant to synthesize hydrogen which can then be used for various purposes. The first goal of this work was to add the power-to-hydrogen sector into the unit-commitment and power dispatch model Dispa-SET. The second objective was to soft-link Dispa-SET with the long-term investment model JRC-EU-TIMES and investigate the benefits of this sector in terms of curtailment, total costs, CO2 emissions, etc.

The linking between JRC-EU-TIMES and Dispa-SET allowed to observe the importance of power-to-hydrogen in using the extra renewable production and avoiding curtailment. Indeed, 20% of the total renewable production is used to produce hydrogen. This highlights the importance of sector coupling in future energy systems. Moreover, the results showed that hydrogen storage is not seasonal. Finally, the importance of checking the system feasibility of long-term planing models was demonstrated as TIMES overestimates renewable production by 15% compared to Dispa-SET.