Hydrogen, as a clean fuel, can provide all the requirements and characteristics of a clean and reliable energy carrier in the long term as a suitable alternative to fossil fuels. In this paper, a power generation system using hydrogen storage has been investigated. For this purpose, 64 photovoltaic modules with area of 2.16 m 2 for each module and 329 PW and 5.5 kW PEM fuel cell and electrolyzer were used in this hybrid system. The day product of hydrogen day has been calculated as 158 kg. The system has been subjected to exergy analysis and, hence the efficiency and destruction of exergy components have been calculated. The annual average electrical production by photovoltaic system is 4850 W. The average annual exergy efficiency of each component including compressor, electrolyzer, fuel cell, and photovoltaic cell has been calculated as 75.9%, 11.2%, 32.8%, and 10.8%, respectively. The energy and exergy efficiencies of the system have been calculated for different days and its average annual values have been obtained 20.4% and 21.8%, respectively. Cost of electricity is 0.127 $/kWh, which is compatible with solar thermal and wind turbine offshore electricity costs. Finally, according to the advanced exergy analysis in all equipment’s except the photovoltaic cell, the highest exergy destruction has been related to exogenous unavoidable.

Introduction

Hydrogen as a clean fuel can be a suitable alternative to fossil fuels due to the fact that it has the characteristics of a clean and safe energy carrier in the long run, in addition to its highest energy per unit (Mitlitsky et al., 1998). The fuel cell and electrolysis unit’s combination has become a new strategy for suppling the required hydrogen to the fuel cell for power generating unit. This combined system is the main source of power and applications in several units (Rekioua et al., 2014). Hydrogen production for the use in fuel cells has been widely investigated. Bilgen (2004) examined various methods to produce hydrogen from renewable energy resource. A similar study was done be Levene et al. (2007) and Smaoui et al. (2015). Integration of photovoltaic (PV) system with fuel cells has been recently investigated for the purpose of hydrogen production (Babayan et al., 2019). A new PV system integrated with polymer electrolyte membrane (PEM) fuel cell using phase change material (PCM) as a storage medium has been presented (Babayan et al., 2019) to produce hydrogen in a filling station of hydrogen. The study showed that the use of PCM resulted in an improvement of energy and exergy efficiencies of the proposed system. Ashari et al. (2012) investigated a system consisting of PEM fuel cell, reformer, burner, and heat exchanger to provide the required electricity, heat and domestic hot water for a residential building. The study revealed that an 8.5 kW fuel cell could meet all the building loads requirements. Residential electricity cost was calculated to be 0.39 $/kWh which is considered to be a high electricity cost. This type of fuel cell was also investigated by Saidi et al. (Saidi et al., 2005a; Saidi et al., 2005b).