Simulations of a flexible 100 kWelPEM Fuel Cell power plant for the provision of grid balancing services

The continuous growth of non-programmable renewable energy resources penetration leads to unpredictable oscillations of the net load faced by dispatchable power plants, hindering the reliability and stability of the electric grid and requiring additional flexible resources. The EU project GRASSHOPPER focuses on MW-scale Fuel Cell Power Plant (FCPP) based on low temperature PEM technology. The project aims to setup and demonstrate a 100 kWel PEM FCPP, flexible in power output and designed to provide grid support. This work presents a dynamic simulation model of the FCPP, developed to simulate plant flexible operation and identify the best management strategy, aiming at optimizing the efficiency while reducing the degradation rate. Cold start up simulations, according to a warm-up procedure limiting stack degradation, result in a time to operation equal to 26 minutes. A sensitivity analysis is performed to determine which parameters mostly influence the warm-up duration, showing that it is possible to reduce start-up time substantially (e.g. down to 3 minutes with component preheating). On the other hand, simulations at variable load along the entire range of operation (20-100 kWel), according to grid balancing requirements, show that the plant is able to ramp up and down between the minimum to the maximum load in about 40 seconds.