From solar to hydrogen: Preliminary experimental investigation on a small scale facility

Issues of exhaustible natural resources, fluctuating fossil fuel prices and improvements in electric power systems motivated governments to behave positively toward the development of distributed generation. In addition, progresses in small size generation technologies and storage systems give rise to a significant diffusion in microgrids, working together with conventional power grid. Indeed, in the next future, domestic microgrids are expected to play a fundamental role in electric power networks, driving both the academic and industrial research interests in developing high efficient and reliable conversion and storage technologies. In this context, this study presents a feasible configuration of a solar-hydrogen integrated microgrid and documents the procedure to characterize the overall efficiency of a laboratory scale test facility. Experimental results highlight that the most significant inefficiencies in the solar to hydrogen conversion process are mainly attributed to the solar to electrical energy conversion process, being responsible for about 89% of losses. The overall laboratory scale solar to hydrogen chain can reach conversion efficiency up to 5.3%.