Power conditioning for a wind-hydrogen energy system

In addition to the efforts to reduce the costs of renewable energy technologies and electrolyzers, the development of suitable controllers are needed for cost-competitive electricity production by renewable-hydrogen power plants. In this paper, a novel control is proposed for a wind-electrolysis system, which match the wind power output to the electrolyzer power requirements, thus gaining in system performance. It basically consists in continuously shaping the power reference of a conventional maximum power point tracking algorithm. Thus, high aerodynamic power conversion efficiency is achieved fulfilling at the same time the electrolyzer specifications. This control strategy is developed using concepts of the reference conditioning technique and of the sliding mode control theory. The proposed control algorithm is extremely simple, easy to implement and robust to parameter uncertainties. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.