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

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.