Hydrogen-producing wind turbines have gained increasing attention in distributed renewable-to-hydrogen systems. In the absence of high-grade thermal sources, exploiting intra-turbine low-grade waste heat to enhance system profitability represents a novel and promising application. This paper presents an evaluation of a hydrogen-producing wind turbine (HP-WT) with solid-oxide electrolysis cells (SOECs) enhanced by intra-turbine low-grade waste heat recovery. A unified electro-thermal-profitability model and a multi-period, nonconvex profit optimization with thermodynamic bounds and a 5-minute grid ramp-rate constraint are built. Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is selected and benchmarked against the genetic algorithm under identical settings. On 24-hour studies, the proposed dispatch respects the 5% ramp-rate limit, avoids SOEC on-off cycling, and increases cumulative profit. A waterfall analysis shows that most of the improvements come from hydrogen revenue enhanced by waste-heat assistance (e.g., +€577 on a representative day). Sensitivity analysis indicates only a slight shift of the hydrogen-electricity decision boundary. However, material profit gains at mid-to-high available power, with a price-insensitive band below 2 MW. A 10-turbine case confirms direct scalability. 6-8% wake losses reduce absolute profit but do not compromise feasibility.
Tian et al. (Thu,) studied this question.