Modeling and control of a renewable hybrid energy system with hydrogen storage

This paper deals with system integration and controller design for power management of a stand-alone renewable energy (RE) hybrid system, which is at the construction stage in Lambton College (Sarnia, ON, Canada). The system consists of five main components: photovoltaic arrays, wind turbine, electrolyzer, hydrogen storage tanks, and fuel cell. The model for each process component is developed, and all the components are integrated in a Matlab/Simulink environment. A two-level control system is implemented, comprising a supervisory controller, which ensures the power balance between intermittent RE generation, energy storage, and dynamic load demand, as well as local controllers for the photovoltaic, wind, electrolyzer, and fuel cell unit. Simulations are performed to document the efficacy of the proposed power management strategy.