THE VISION
“The world recognises the need to push towards a higher level of electrification.”
The aim of this project was to address the stochastic nature of renewable energy, by investigating hydrogen as a potential storage medium, now and in the future.
Both developed and developing worlds alike are working towards providing reliable, environmentally friendly and affordable energy. The deployment of more renewable energy is paramount to addressing climate change however renewable energy can come with many problems, mostly due to its inherently stochastic nature. For sustainable energy to be realised, the whole persona of the energy industry needs to be changed.
The UK itself has made the commitment to reduce GHGs by at least 80% by 2050 as well as achieving 30% of electricity from renewable by 2020, whilst strong progress has been made there is still a long way to go... To work towards the decarbonisation of the UK, a key pathway identified by the government is the vast electrification and potential decentralisation of energy across various industries. Our goal is to make progress in the research of how this movement may be enabled in an efficient manner.
It is clear that renewables will continue to drive the global energy transformation so the group adopted a futuristic vision in order to aid in tackling the key problems arising from such technology. This project presents the idea of 'District Electricity' which involves conducting a feasibility study for the potential of a solar-hydrogen storage system. A sizing model was created for the system which also incorporates current and projected cost.
Adopting a more global outlook...
Vision H2 was further inspired by the Sustainable Development Goals set by the UN, in particular number 7 and 11 as seen below. The model developed harnesses solar energy hence it is anticipated that the system could be most suitable for deployment in countries rich in terms of solar irradiance such as in Africa in which poverty can be most prevalent. Acknowledging that under current circumstances the costs of the components of the proposed system are too high for implementation of the system in such a setting, the group investigated and produced a projection of costs to determine when such a solution may be possible in the future.
