Technical, Environmental and Economical Aspects of Hybrid Systems Including Renewables and Fuel Cells

In this paper, some configurations including renewables and fuel cells are studied. Technical, environmental and economical aspects are treated in the frame of the EU regulations concerning the ‘emission trading’ issue and the way in which Italy has implemented the relevant EU directive. The study has been carried out considering some architectures including renewables such as photovoltaic and wind with a back up system to increase continuity of supply based on the application of fuel cells and of a hydrogen storage system. Performing several runs with different values of the cost of energy (COE) bought from the network and produced with traditional fuel, it has been observed that, for some of the considered architectures, the breakeven point in terms of COE is about twice the actual values. To draw these and other interesting conclusions, parametric studies, varying the COE bought from the network and considering different architectures have been carried out by means of the software HOMER 2.1 set up by the National Renewable Energy Laboratories (NREL), USA.