Optimization of Resilient, Reliable, and Renewable Energy Infrastructure for Large-Scale Essential Services in Urban Environments

Resilient, reliable, and renewable energy infrastructure will be needed for many different industrial and commercial applications - such as data centers, hospitals, military facilities, and other essential services – currently located in urban environments where space constraints and expensive real estate are hurdles. Most of these applications have extremely strict and high standards for energy service uptime, which is jeopardized by the call for conversion towards more renewable energy resources, which are intermittent and fluctuating (e.g., solar and wind). In this effort, we aim to demonstrate that renewable hydrogen – in concert with a cheap and renewable power supply on the electric grid – provide the best solution to meet 100% renewable energy conversion goals, maintain firm power to critical and essential services, and maintain stringent reliability and resiliency requirements. The goal of this work is to analyze the application of renewable H₂ as a method to increase energy system resiliency and reliability for the entire Greater Los Angeles Area. This is achieved by leveraging the existing gas transmission system to transmit 100% renewable hydrogen, providing a clean power source to run distributed generation (H₂ fuel cells) that can produce electricity at or near point of use when there are electrical transmission system outages.