Integration of Capital Costs and Operating Profits into Distributed Hydrogen-Electric Power System Design

Distributed hydrogen-electric systems produce hydrogen through the electrolysis of water for local distribution. Economic analysis of these systems involves the consideration of operating profit and capital cost. Current methods of design do not incorporate both of these quantities into the design objective. This work presents a method of integrating the capital cost and the operating profit into an optimization so that the system can be designed to maximize economic gain. The method is formulated and validated using a distributed hydrogen-electric system known as the hydrogen power park.