Techno-economic analysis of a nuclear-wind hybrid system with hydrogen storage

Climate change and increasing electricity demand have changed the electricity generation structure to include more renewable energy. To keep the global temperature increment within 2 °C, the fraction of renewable energy in the energy mix will continuously increase. High penetration of wind and solar energy challenges the electricity grid as they are not dispatchable. Hybrid energy systems with energy storage have the opportunity to meet the challenge due to their stability and flexibility in energy dispatching. However, their performances and economics remain questionable and quantitative analyzes are needed. In this work, Hybrid Nuclear-Renewable Tool (HyNuRT) code is developed to analyze the technical and economic performance of a hybrid nuclear-wind system with hydrogen storage. In the code, technical models of wind turbines, nuclear units, and hydrogen production and storage units are developed and coupled to economical evaluation models. The economic model considered features of a small modular reactor which is more suitable to couple with renewable energy due to its lower power output and modular fabrication. The novelty of this method is to estimate system performance of typical months of the year with stochastic real-time data and predict system economic value including the construction phase. This method is computational time-saving and makes optimization possible in a relatively short time. The work analyzed the techno-economic performances of conservative and balanced cases to evaluate their performances and economic values by real grid demand data. Results show balanced case can increase the internal return rate by 2.1% with missing only limited peak demand. Comparison of hybrid nuclear-wind systems with and without hydrogen storage show that with assumptions in this work, hydrogen storage shows its advantage on both to meet the grid demand and increase the economic return by 1% while not strongly impacting the cash flow. The results show hybrid system with hydrogen storage can enhance both the system performance and the economic value under proper configuration.