Energy Management in Offshore Islanded Hydrogen DC Microgrids: A Cost and Electrolyzer Efficiency Optimization Approach
Date
Authors
Indrajith, Bawantha
Gunawardane, Kosala
Hossain, Md Alamgir
Li, Li
Nicholson, Robert
Zamora, Ramon
Preece, Mark Anthony
Supervisor
Item type
Journal Article
Degree name
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Abstract
In the real-time energy management of offshore islanded microgrids, determining the optimal operating points of storage systems, particularly in hydrogen-based storage, poses significant challenges. These arise from the stochastic nature of offshore Renewable Energy Sources (RES), variable power demand, and the volatility of hydrogen systems. To address these, a novel objective function has been developed that integrates electrolyzer system efficiency into the Energy Management Strategy (EMS) of a DC microgrid. Unlike most existing literature, which considers electrolyzer efficiency as a constant, this work treats efficiency as a dynamic variable that depends on operating current, temperature, and pressure. The behavior of the electrolyzer efficiency with respect to these parameters is modeled, verified, and subsequently incorporated into the EMS. A MINLP based EMS is developed to implement the proposed formulation, and its effectiveness is validated by demonstrating optimal microgrid performance under the above scenario. Notably, the impact of optimal temperature and pressure control is evidenced by electrolyzer efficiency improvements of 1.7% and 3.1% in the efficiency-focused and multi-objective scenarios, respectively. The proposed EMS is evaluated against a rule-based and heuristic (PSO) methods. In the cost-based case, the developed method shows 36.5% and 0.04% cost reductions relative to the rule-based approaches, and a 0.39% reduction relative to PSO. In the efficiency-based scheme, it attains 0.10% efficiency gain over PSO for the optimal temperature-pressure method, and in the multi-objective case, it delivers 7.40% efficiency gain versus PSO.Description
Keywords
40 Engineering, 4008 Electrical Engineering, 4009 Electronics, Sensors and Digital Hardware, 7 Affordable and Clean Energy, 03 Chemical Sciences, 09 Engineering, Energy, 34 Chemical sciences, 40 Engineering, Offshore DC microgrid, Renewable energy, PEM electrolyzer, PEM fuel cell, Hydrogen storage, Energy management
Source
International Journal of Hydrogen Energy, ISSN: 0360-3199 (Print), Elsevier BV, 222, 154256-154256. doi: 10.1016/j.ijhydene.2026.154256
Publisher's version
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© 2026 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of Hydrogen Energy Publications LLC. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons CC-BY license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. You are not required to obtain permission to reuse this article.