Techno-economic analysis employing of on-site hydrogen production & storage systems with renewable energy for telecommunication sites in Sri Lanka

Abstract

Energy can be termed as the life blood of the telecommunication industry even its technologies had evolved very rapidly. The concern is focused not only on the way of the energy is supplied, but also on the continuity of the supply and the cost of the same are critical concerns in the industry. With the ever-increasing price of the fossil fuel and the commercial electricity supply which depends on the fossil fuel, telecommunication industry had begun the seeking of options with renewable energy. The inherent limitations of renewable energy were identified and introduced the hydrogen storage concept in to the renewable energy conversion system to overcome them and maintain an un-interruptible power supply. Under this research, the determination of the optimum composition of the system components is done which yields the best advantage of the proposed technological concept. Since the cost is a major concern when it comes to the industry, a mathematical model had been developed to perform the techno-economic analysis of the viability of deploying hydrogen storage with renewable energy system to power a given base station site under Sri Lankan context. In addition, the sensitivity analysis was performed taking the price of inputs as variables. Tool HOMER had been used to validate the results of the developed mathematical model. The developed model can be used to check whether the telecommunication operator can omit the capital expenditure of Diesel generator and Battery bank when investing on the power system for a particular base station site.