Safety Cost of a Large Scale Hydrogen System for Photovoltaic Energy Regulation

Hydrogen can be used as a buffer for storing intermittent electricity produced by solar plants and/or wind farms. The MYRTE project in Corsica, France, aims to operate and test a large scale hydrogen facility for regulating theelectricity produced by a 560kWp photovoltaic plant.Due to the large quantity of hydrogen and oxygen produced and stored (respectively 333 Kg and 2654Kg), this installation faces safety issues and safety regulations constraints that can lead to extra costs. These extra costs may concern detectors, monitoring, barrier equipments, that have to be taken into account for evaluating the total cost of the system.Relying on the MYRTE example that is a R&D platform, the present work consists in listing the whole environmental and safety regulations to be applied in France on both Hydrogen and Oxygen production and storage. A methodology for evaluating safety extra costs is currently being developed. This methodology takes into account various hydrogen storage technologies (gaseous and solid state).The result of this work will be used to extrapolate the future safety costs for the next large scale hydrogen systems for further PV or wind energy storage applications.