Techno-economic design of energy systems for airport electrification: a hydrogen-solar-storage integrated microgrid solution

Can aviation really become less polluting? The electrification of airport energy system as a micro-grid is a promising solution to achieve zero emission airport operation, however such electrification approach presents the engineering challenge of integrating new energy resources, such as hydrogen supply and solar energy as attractive options to decarbonize the present system. This paper explores the techno-economic benefits of integrating hydrogen supply, electric auxiliary power unit (APU) of aircraft, electric vehicles, photovoltaic energy (PV), and battery storage system into electrified airport energy system. The hydrogen fuel cell generation provides great flexibility to supply aircraft at remote stands, and reduces the carbon emissions caused by traditional fuel-powered APU. A mixed integer linear programming optimization method based on life cycle theory is developed for capacity sizing of hydrogen energy system, PV and battery storage, with optimization objective of minimizing the total economic costs as well as considering environmental benefits of the proposed airport microgrid system. Case studies are conducted by five different energy integration scenarios with techno-economic and environmental assessments to quantify the benefits of integrating hydrogen and renewable energy into airport. Compared with the benchmark scenarios, the integration of hydrogen energy system reduced the total annual costs and carbon emissions of airport energy system by 41.6% and 67.29%, respectively. Finally, sensitivity analysis of key system parameters such as solar irradiance, grid emission factor, elctricity price, carbon tax, unit investment cost of hydrogen energy system have been investigated to inform the design of hydrogen-solar-storage integrated energy system for future airport electrification.