Equipment Plan of a Compound Interconnection Micro-grid Composed of Diesel Power Plants and a Fuel Cell

Abstract

Installation of the fuel cell micro-grid in an urban area is the technology of spreading the utilization of hydrogen energy. For example, hydrogen production using green energy and reforming technology of natural gas can be introduced. Generally, as for the introduction of a micro-grid in a city area, the following points are expected: (a) The distance for the heat supply is short and effective use of exhaust heat is possible [38, 39]; (b) load leveling of existing large-sized power generation equipment is possible; and (c) since a facility suitable for the energy demand characteristics of a community can be installed, it is expected to be a technology in which energy efficiency is high and environmental impact is low [21, 22, 40]. However, the proton exchange membrane-type fuel cell (PEM-FC) has expensive electrode material (catalyst material and a solid polymer membrane). Furthermore, since the system is complex, it is difficult to commercialize it immediately. Thus, reduction of the number of installations of the expensive fuel cell by connecting PEM-FC to a micro-grid, and supplying power to two or more buildings is considered in this chapter. However, the subject of this system is the frequent partialload operation with low efficiency, when power is supplied to two or more buildings using a large-capacity fuel cell (FC). As technology to solve this issue, a fuel cell is divided into small-capacity units, and as the method of increasing the load factor of each unit is used [25]. However, by this method the number of fuel cell units increases greatly, and facility costs increase.