Enhancing wind-solar hybrid hydrogen production through multi-state electrolyzer management and complementary energy optimization

Wind-solar hybrid hydrogen production is an effective technique route, by converting the fluctuate renewable electricity into high-quality hydrogen. However, the intermittency of wind and solar resources also exert challenges to the efficient hydrogen production. In order to address this issue, this paper developed a day-ahead scheduling strategy based on multi-state transitions of the alkaline electrolyzer(AEL), which improves system flexibility by coordinating the operation of the electrolyzer with the battery. Meanwhile, K-means+ + algorithm is also applied to scenario clustering, and then proposed a capacity configuration method. Based on the adopted case study, the wind-solar installed capacity of the designed hydrogen production system it first optimized, and the power fluctuation is mitigated with the complementarity index considering volatility of 12.49%. Moreover, the adopted scheduling strategy effectively reduces idle and standby states of the electrolyzer, with the daily average energy utilization rate of 12 typical scenarios reaching 92.83%. In addition, the wind-solar hydrogen system exhibits favorable economic potential, the internal return rate and the investment payback period reach to 6.81% and 12.87 years, respectively. This research provides valuable insights for efficiently producing hydrogen using renewable energy sources and promoting their synergistic operation.