Time-Series AI Forecasting of Wind-to-Hydrogen Production

The transition to carbon-neutral energy has increased the reliance upon renewable sources of energy, e.g., wind power, placing added demands on resilience and stability of the power grid. Wind-to-hydrogen production systems can be a solution for addressing these demands. By converting excess wind energy into hydrogen via electrolysis, these systems can effectively store the intermittent energy generated by wind turbines. This study discusses the application of two time-series prediction models, i.e., long short-term memory (LSTM) and bidirectional long short-term memory (Bi-LSTM), in forecasting the energy of wind farms, subsequently used for an assessment of hydrogen production means of a proton exchange membrane (PEM) electrolyzer. Using a dataset comprising wind speed, active power, and wind direction, inputs were normalized, and wind direction was transformed into sine and cosine components to retain circular characteristics. Bi-LSTM demonstrated superior accuracy with lower testing RMSE than LSTM. Integrating wind forecasts with a PEM electrolyzer model, incorporating critical electro-chemical parameters, revealed an optimal efficiency of 63.611% at a membrane thickness of 0.00254 cm and a temperature of 70°C. Bi-LSTM forecasts boosted hydrogen production by 5% to 8% compared to LSTM.