WHYBS – Wind and Hydrogen systems

The rapid development of the offshore wind industry and decrease in cost is a realistic recourse to reach 100% renewable systems. However, in local or regional energy system the fluctuation of energy might be problematic. Wind farms could potentially handle power fluctuations by using, e.g., storage systems by hydrogen, that also can be used by other applications and provide an important contribution to green transition. To understand how utilize these techniques it is imperative to possess high-fidelity time series describing the wind flow that can be achieved by using large-eddy simulations (LES).

Atmospheric flows are inherently complex, and the importance and need to understand atmospheric flows increase as climate change continues to intensify and create unseen atmospheric conditions. Scientists and engineers develop and employ advanced computational models to simulate the atmosphere, but even with the most advanced modeling achievements, the amount of generated data to analyze required to get a statistical base for an overall understanding is very challenging and requires novel data driven methods.   

This PhD project is a part of the project “WHYBS – Wind and Hydrogen systems” where two PhD students are participating. The PhD project focuses on the overall understanding of large-scale wind energy potential and will provide input to the other PhD project how large offshore wind farms can provide energy for hydrogen production that can be used for storage, used by the transport sector, or by large-scale industrial applications.

The wind energy part of WHYBS will provide important input and overall understanding of large-scale wind energy potential. That understanding will provide input to the hydrogen part of the project with for example understanding of power potential and variation due to different wind farm control strategies. Especially, if these strategies are updated with variation of both electric and hydrogen production strategies. 

This project is a part of Uppsala University Graduate School in Sustainability Studies (GRASS).

Find out more about GRASS