Energy Management System for Hydrogen-based Flexibility Services

Distributed generation based on Variable Renewable Energy Sources (VRES) is increasing its penetration in power grids to achieve decarbonized and affordable energy worldwide before 2050. Although overcoming this goal as soon as possible is desirable, the high VRES penetration implies more significant disturbances in the power grid because of the reduction of both inertia and the Effective Short Circuit Ratio (ESCR). In this regard, Independent System Operators (ISOs) and Distribution System Operators (DSOs) are the key elements to coordinate properly the diverse system players before, during, and after disturbances.In this context, hydrogen production is considered one of the most important processes to accelerate the energy transition because it can be used to trigger chemical reactions inside of fuel-cells and also used as combustion fuel without carbon emissions. Therefore, if it is reliable, applications such as combustion-based inertia supply using Carnot batteries, and short-term over-demand fulfillment based on fuel cells, are more feasible, contributing to energy transition without affecting the power grid performance. Because of the promissory results in the hydrogen synthesis process, and the accelerated climate change, it seems that its integration into the power grid operation will be overcome in the middle term. Meanwhile, ISOs and DSOs should state the new market rules and energy management policies by including new players such as hydrogen-powered services providers, and distributed generation. In this regard, power grid flexibility is a critical topic since the transitions related to generation and load disconnection and reconnection, congestion in power lines, and the isolation of microgrids from the utility grid, are manageable through a distributed integration of hydrogen-powered services, contributing as energy storage, and inertia supply. In addition to hydrogen, both, hydrogen-powered services and power generation are also diverse and increasingly distributed, which agrees with the current trend in distributed and short-term control schemes for microgrids. These schemes require information exchange between DSO-DSO and ISO-DSO, performed through a transactive scheme, to properly compute the control action. Therefore, distributed schemes in power grids demand adjacent infrastructure related to high-performance communication networks and information accessibility in order to preserve the power grid performance. In this regard, issues related to generation ¿behind the meter¿ and data granularity are highlighted when prosumers are integrated into the power grid operation. This research proposal entitled ¿Energy Management System for Hydrogen-based Flexibility Services¿ will analyze the requirements for the successful integration of hydrogen-powered services used by Latin American power grids when flexibility-related actions are required to preserve the system¿s reliability. This proposal is focused on the interactions among the ISOs and DSOs, assuming that the latter is able to cluster prosumers, loads, and energy storage systems in microgrids. In this sense, additional requirements for energy management systems will be considered to include the diversity of hydrogen provenances and flexibility services.