From Curtailed Renewable Energy to Green Hydrogen: Infrastructure Planning for Hydrogen Fuel-Cell Vehicles

Hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles (HFVs) have been proposed as a promising green transportation alternative. For regions with renewable energy curtailment (due to insufficient demand or lack of transmission capacity), promoting HFVs can achieve the dual benefit of reducing curtailment of renewables and developing sustainable transportation. However, promoting HFVs faces several major hurdles, including uncertain vehicle adoption, the lack of refueling infrastructure, the spatial mismatch between hydrogen demand and renewable sources for hydrogen production, and the strained power transmission infrastructure. In this paper, we address these challenges and study how to promote HFV adoption by deploying HFV infrastructure and utilizing renewable sources. Taking the perspective of a planner that aims to achieve a target adoption level of HFV, we formulate a planning model that jointly determines the locations and capacities of hydrogen refueling stations and hydrogen plants, as well as electricity transmission and grid upgrade. Despite the complexity of explicitly considering drivers’ HFV adoption behavior, the optimization model can be reformulated as a tractable mixed integer second-order cone program. We apply our model calibrated with real data to the case of Sichuan, a province in China with abundant hydro resources and a vast amount of hydropower curtailment. Numerical experiments show that promoting the HFV adoption can overall help reduce hydropower curtailment, but the effectiveness depends on factors such as the HFV adoption target, the grid upgrade cost, and the electricity purchase price. We also find that modeling the grid operations jointly brings significant cost savings by avoiding excessive ex-post remedial grid investment, which underscores the importance of a systematic modeling approach considering both transportation and power systems.