Sustainable Green Hydrogen Production: Trading Off Costs and Environmental Impacts

This work develops a novel optimisation approach to determine the optimal installed capacities of wind, solar and hydrogen storage systems for the continuous production of green hydrogen, targeting the lowest "True Cost of Hydrogen" (TCOH). TCOH is a metric that combines both costs and life cycle environmental impacts, facilitating decision-making and supporting project design. Two hypothetical scenarios were evaluated using evolutionary optimisation of the TCOH, namely the “Slow” or “Fast” technology developments projected for 2030. Results show that optimising TCOH (for both cost and environmental impacts) may reduce a large range of environmental impact categories by up to 37% while increasing cost by up to 0.23€/kg H2. Overall, the proposed method allows for a cost-effective hydrogen production but also contributes to the mitigation of relevant environmental impacts. Our approach has the potential to add to the current carbon footprint requirements towards truly sustainable pathways for green hydrogen production.