Posters

Abstract

Individually, wind turbines and electrolysers are relatively mature technologies. However, their integration into an islanded offshore system is a new concept, with only a handful of demonstrator projects in existence. This paper aims to highlight one important aspects of this system: the need for an interfacing energy storage. In this paper, the energy buffer is considered for two different scenarios: the first focuses on the power rate mismatch, and the second focuses on higher rated wind turbine scenarios. 12 hour time series datasets are used for these simulations. The first study, power rate mismatch, is caused by the fact that electrolysers respond to reference changes slower than wind turbines respond to gusts. Therefore, an energy buffer is required to maintain a steady DC link voltage, ensuring safe operation of interfacing systems, the electrolyser and wind turbine. The energy buffer requirements for relatively fast acting electrolysers and relatively slow acting electrolysers are compared. While the fast acting electrolyser requires less energy than the slow acting electrolyser, the absolute storage requirements are nonetheless small for both. The second study is driven by the outcome of techno-economic studies, which suggest having a wind turbine rated at 20% more than the electrolyser. The impact of not curtailing the wind turbine power is studied for different measured wind turbine power profiles. The outcome of this study is that huge energy storage requirements, in the 100s of kWh range, are required for maximising the energy capture. As this is unrealistically large, careful consideration of the supervisory control strategy is required to manage the integration of wind turbines and electrolysers to smaller, and more realistic, energy storage capacity.