Province-level green hydrogen production site screening in Türkiye: Hybrid PV-wind electrolyzer sizing, discrete grid-search LCOH optimization and leakage-controlled explainable analysis

This study develops a province-level green hydrogen production-site screening framework for Türkiye using hourly NASA POWER data for all 81 provinces during 2020-2024. The framework combines solar and wind generation simulation, hybrid-system sizing, electrolyzer operation, levelized cost of hydrogen (LCOH) discrete grid-search optimization, delivery and storage sensitivity analysis, and leakage-controlled explainable machine learning. With a 100-m hub-height wind model and air-density correction, mean current-cost LCOH is 5.921 USD/kg H 2 ; Çanakkale is the lowest-cost province at 5.232 USD/kg H 2 with a 60% solar–40% wind configuration. The 2030 lower-cost scenario reduces mean LCOH to 4.175 USD/kg H 2 . Constant-delivery sensitivity shows that storage requirements materially increase LCOH, demonstrating why results represent production-site screening rather than a bankable hydrogen-valley assessment. The explainable analysis excludes variables that are direct algebraic components of LCOH and identifies renewable-resource and design variables as the main drivers.