Design and assessment of a solar energy based integrated system with hydrogen production and storage for sustainable buildings

The current study investigates a holistically developed solar energy system combined with a ground-sourced heat pump system for stand-alone usage to produce power, heat, and cooling along with domestic hot water for residential buildings. An integrated system is proposed where three types of building-integrated photovoltaic plant orientation are considered and integrated with a vertical-oriented ground-sourced heat pump system as well as an anion exchange membrane electrolyser for hydrogen-based energy storage along with proton exchange membrane fuel cells. The ground-sourced heat pump system covers the heating requirements and exploits the available thermal energy under the ground. Hydrogen subsystem enables the integrated system to be used anytime by compensating the peak periods with stored hydrogen via fuel cell and exploiting the excess energy to produce hydrogen via electrolyser. The photovoltaic plant orientations are extensively designed by considering geometries of three different applications, namely, rooftop photovoltaic, building-integrated photovoltaic fac,ade and photovoltaic canopy. The shading and geometrical losses of photovoltaic applications are extensively identified and considered. In addition, the openly available high-rise building load profiles are ob-tained from the OpenEI network and are modified accordingly to utilize in the current study. The building requirements are considered for 8760 h annually with meteorological data and energy usage characteristics of the selected regions. The integrated system is assessed via thermodynamic-based approach from energy and exergy points of views. In order to increase generality, the proposed building energy system is analyzed for five different cities around the globe. The obtained results show that a 20-floor building with approximately 62,680 m2 residential area needs between 550 kWp and 1550 kWp of a photovoltaic plant in five different cities. For Ottawa, Canada, the overall energy and exergy efficiencies are found as 18.76% and 10.49%, respectively, in a typical meteorological year. For the city of Istanbul in Turkey, a 20-floor building is found to be self-sufficient by only using the building's surface area with a 495 kWp BIPV facade and a 90 kWp rooftop PV. (c) 2023 Hydrogen Energy Publications LLC. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Automated summary

The study investigates an integrated solar energy system combined with a ground-sourced heat pump system for stand-alone use in residential buildings. Three types of building-integrated photovoltaic plant orientations are considered and combined with a ground-sourced heat pump system, an electrolyser for hydrogen-based energy storage, and fuel cells. The system is assessed for different cities globally and the results show the required photovoltaic plant power for a 20-floor building in different cities. The overall energy and exergy efficiencies are analyzed, and in some cases, self-sufficiency is achieved using building's surface area for photovoltaic installations.