Balancing hydrogen delivery in national energy systems: impact of the temporal flexibility of hydrogen delivery on export prices

TL;DR

This study addresses how the timing of hydrogen delivery affects export pricing by quantifying balancing costs under four delivery regimes in a sector-coupled energy system. It uses the PyPSA-Earth framework to model Brazil, Morocco, and Turkey with 3-hour resolution, exploring export volumes of $10$, $50$, and $200$ TWh, and implements four regimes defined by $\dot{\epsilon}_{t} = \tau Q$ where $\tau \in \{1, 1/52, 1/365, 1/8760\}$ for flexible, weekly, daily, and stable delivery. The main contributions are (i) explicit quantification of price differences between flexible and strict delivery profiles—up to about $36\%$ (Brazil), $47\%$ (Morocco), and $18\%$ (Turkey)—across volumes, and (ii) a country-specific analysis of the drivers behind these costs (hydro peaking, transmission congestion, and storage needs). The findings highlight that while flexible delivery minimizes total system costs by leveraging renewables, it can yield irregular export pricing, whereas stable delivery provides predictability at a higher cost, informing policy and planning for hydrogen trade and related large-demand sectors.

Abstract

Hydrogen is expected to play a key role in the energy transition. Analyses exploring the price of hydrogen usually calculate average or marginal production costs regardless of the time of delivery. A key factor that affects the price of hydrogen is the balancing costs, which we define as the expense of ensuring a steady schedule of hydrogen delivery. We explore the effect of delivering hydrogen to the export ports at different schedules, ranging from fully flexible to moderately stable with a daily and weekly buffer, to fully stable. We quantify the rise in hydrogen price with strict balancing constraint in three countries: Brazil, Morocco and Turkey, and three export volumes: 10, 50 and 200 TWh. The price difference between the flexible and stable schedules was found to reach a maximum of 36% in Brazil, 47% in Morocco and 18% in Turkey across the different export volumes.

Figures (3)

• Figure 1: Optimal export delivery schedules under different flexibility constraints in Brazil, Morocco, and Turkey.
• Figure 2: Hydrogen export prices of 10, 50 and 200 TWh in Brazil, Morocco and Turkey under all flexibility constraints.
• Figure 3: Component-wise breakdown of normalized additional system costs triggered by hydrogen export in two scenarios.