True Cost of Solar Hydrogen

By Eero Vartiainen, Christian Breyer, David Moser, Eduardo Román Medina, Chiara Busto, G. Masson, Elina Bosch, A. Jäger-Waldau. Solar RRL, 2021

130 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Green hydrogen will be an essential part of the future 100% sustainable energy and industry system. Up to one‐third of the required solar and wind electricity would eventually be used for water electrolysis to produce hydrogen, increasing the cumulative electrolyzer capacity to about 17 TWel by 2050. The key method applied in this research is a learning curve approach for the key technologies, i.e., solar photovoltaics (PV) and water electrolyzers, and levelized cost of hydrogen (LCOH). Sensitivities for the hydrogen demand and various input parameters are considered. Electrolyzer capital expenditure (CAPEX) for a large utility‐scale system is expected to decrease from the current 400 €/kWel to 240 €/kWel by 2030 and to 80 €/kWel by 2050. With the continuing solar PV cost decrease, this will lead to an LCOH decrease from the current 31–81 €/MWhH2,LHV (1.0–2.7 €/kgH2) to 20–54 €/MWhH2,LHV (0.7–1.8 €/kgH2) by 2030 and 10–27 €/MWhH2,LHV (0.3–0.9 €/kgH2) by 2050, depending on the location. The share of PV electricity cost in the LCOH will increase from the current 63% to 74% by 2050.

Subfields: Automotive Engineering, Energy Engineering and Power Technology, Pollution

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f5bd229edcc202d54fa143dade0bcda2e0d0e259

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Automotive Engineering

In Energy Engineering and Power Technology

In Pollution

Citations in the corpus

On the History and Future of 100% Renewable Energy Systems Research (2022, background): “Fossil hydrogen with CCS does not seem to be a silver bullet on the horizon either [26], [391].”