Techno-economic analysis of combined photovoltaic cells and hydrogen energy systems for data center energy consumption

Abstract

The future energy consumption of data centers is expected to be significant worldwide. From the perspective of carbon neutrality, designing 100 % renewable energy systems with distributed energy resources that can reliably supply energy to data centers is necessary. However, renewables' intrinsic uncontrollable characteristics make the stable energy supply challenging. Herein, we designed a 100 % renewable energy system by combining abundant but uncontrollable solar energy (e.g., photovoltaic (PV) cells) and controllable hydrogen (H2) energy systems (e.g., hydrogen microturbine and fuel cells) for a stable energy supply to an actual data center in South Korea. The hybrid system with on-site hydrogen production would be favorable after 2030 because of the expected decrease in green hydrogen prices and increase in carbon tax. Also, from sensitivity analyses, we found that the total NPC decreased by 75.2 % ($ 83.8M) with the green hydrogen price change from 14.5 $/kg to 3 $/kg.