A Dynamic Heat/Power Decoupling Strategy for the Fuel Cell CHP in the Community Energy System: A Real Case Study in South of China

Fuel cell based combined heat and power (FC-CHP) system that has high energy efficiency while no carbon emissions is a promising distributed energy solution in south of China where is no central heating in the winter but very high power demand. Dealing with the coupling heat and power generation, a decoupling strategy that could satisfy both the thermal/electricity demand meanwhile realize system energy economy is essential. The single-demand-led strategy that either heat-led mode or power-led mode is generally used to decouple the heat/power generations but may loss part of the high efficiency working range of the CHP system. Moreover, the key part of the FC-CHP that the fuel cell may suffer significate degradation in aforementioned methods as ignoring CHP system switching flexibility between heat and power. To address this deficiency, first, a dynamic heat/power switching strategy is developed where FC-CHP is not limited in single-led mode but could choose its output power autonomously with the consideration of fuel cell degradation to improving the users’ profits. Also, a new energy management strategy is proposed based on a hierarchical game that Stackelberg theory against the internal price-based demand response, where the energy system operator (ESO) acts as the leader and FC-CHP users are the followers, aiming at maximizing the benefit of all stakeholders. The proposed EMS with the dynamic switching strategy of FC-CHP are verified by a practical example in Jiangsu province in south of China benefiting in fuel cell degradation reduction and energy consumption economy.