Safety cost of a large scale hydrogen system for photovoltaic energy regulation

Hydrogen can be used as a buffer for storing intermittent electricity produced by solar plants and/or wind farms. The MYRTE project in Corsica, France, aims to operate and test a large scale hydrogen facility for regulating the electricity produced by a 560 kWp photovoltaic plant.Due to the large quantity of hydrogen and oxygen produced and stored (respectively 333 kg and 2654 kg), this installation faces safety issues and safety regulations constraints that can lead to extra costs. These extra costs may concern detectors, monitoring, barrier equipments, that have to be taken into account for evaluating the system‘s total cost.Relying on the MYRTE example that is an R&D platform, the present work consists in listing the whole environmental and safety regulations to be applied in France on both Hydrogen and Oxygen production and storage. A methodology has been developed [1] and [2] for evaluating safety extra costs. This methodology takes into account various hydrogen storage technologies (gaseous and solid state), and is applicable to other ways of storage (batteries, etc.) to compare them. Results of this work, based on a forecast of the operating platform over 20 years, can be used to extrapolate and/or optimize future safety costs of next large scale hydrogen systems for further PV or wind energy storage applications.

► We introduce the concept of MYRTE project: photovoltaic coupled with a hydrogen chain.
► We identify risks and means of hydrogen safety management for that kind of application.
► We define a methodology to assess extra costs associated to hydrogen risks management.
► We analyze hydrogen costs based on a real scale platform (MYRTE).
► We propose costs optimization ways for future hydrogen projects.