How can renewable hydrogen compete with diesel in public transport? Robust design optimization of a hydrogen refueling station under techno-economic and environmental uncertainty

Heavy-duty transport represents nearly 6% of the greenhouse gas emissions in Europe. Renewable hydrogen is a potential option to decarbonize heavy-duty transport, such as buses. Renewable hydrogen for buses promises excellent environmental performance, at the expense of a higher fuel cost, as opposed to a diesel-powered bus fleet. Despite the inherent uncertainty, feasibility studies in this framework generally assume deterministic techno-economic and environmental parameters, which can lead to a suboptimal performance that is sensitive to the random environment. To provide robust design alternatives, we applied robust design optimization on a wind- and solar-powered hydrogen refueling system and a hydrogen- and diesel-powered bus fleet, to optimize the Levelized Cost Of Driving (LCOD) and Carbon Intensity (CI), subject to technical, economic and environmental uncertainties. A fully diesel-powered bus fleet achieves the optimized LCOD mean of 1.24 (sic)/km, but it results in the worst LCOD standard deviation (0.11 (sic)/km), CI mean (1.33 kg(CO2,eq)/km) and CI standard deviation (0.075 kg(CO2,eq)/km) among the optimized designs. To reduce the LCOD standard deviation, CI mean and CI standard deviation, part of the diesel-powered bus fleet is converted into hydrogen-powered buses and the renewable-powered hydrogen refueling station is scaled accordingly. Converting 54% of the diesel-powered bus fleet into hydrogen-powered buses results in a decrease in LCOD standard deviation by 36%, a decrease in CI mean by 46% and a decrease in CI standard deviation by 51%, at the expense of an increase in LCOD mean by only 11%. Future work will focus on the integration of full-electric buses.

Automated summary

Heavy-duty transport accounts for almost 6% of greenhouse gas emissions in Europe. Renewable hydrogen is a potential solution for decarbonizing heavy-duty transport, such as buses. This study applies robust design optimization to a wind- and solar-powered hydrogen refueling system and a hydrogen- and diesel-powered bus fleet to minimize the Levelized Cost Of Driving (LCOD) and Carbon Intensity (CI) considering technical, economic, and environmental uncertainties, and finds that converting part of the diesel-powered bus fleet to hydrogen-powered buses can significantly reduce variance in LCOD and CI while only slightly increasing the mean LCOD.