Use of hydrogen in the civil sector. Technical-economic feasibility study and applications

The energy needs of buildings account for 40 per cent of the total energy demand in the European context and are to date mainly met by traditional technologies using fossil fuels. In order to complete projects to reduce climate-altering emissions, Europe imposes increasingly stringent constraints on new buildings or those subject to major renovation, but at the same time it is necessary to upgrade the existing building stock in order to achieve the targets necessary to keep the global temperature below the 1.5 °C increase compared to 1990. This paper investigates the use in the civil sector of hydrogen as a new sustainable energy vector, analyzing the ways in which it can contribute to the decarbonization of energy supply, in line with the predictions formulated by IRENA. A techno-economic feasibility analysis is conducted on a case study of a condominium-sized residential utility, exploring the possibility of meeting its electricity and heating needs with hydrogen. The system options investigated see the use of a fuel cell as an electric and thermal generator, operating in different modes, and a hybrid boiler as a thermal generator capable of burning a mixture of hydrogen and natural gas. In order to highlight the factors most influencing the mass deployment of hydrogen in the civil sector, a sensitivity analysis is then conducted on a number of technical-economic parameters of interest. Parallel to the study outlined above, the aim of this research is to create a design tool useful for dimensioning and simulating a system based on these hydrogen generators by receiving the loads and characteristics of the users as input data.