Life cycle assessment of a PEMFC-based distributed energy system for hotel application

Abstract Hydrogen fuel cell can not only generate electricity efficiently, but also provide a large amount of thermal energy by recovering the waste heat of the fuel cell stack. This study proposed a PEMFC-based distributed energy systems (PEMFC-DES) containing of input energy, PEMFC-based combined cooling, heating and power (PEMFC-CCHP) system and building loads. The performances of energy, environment, economics of the proposed system are investigated through life cycle assessment (LCA) under different hydrogen-electricity contribution rates (RH ), hydrogen production methods and hydrogen gas prices. The results show that the hydrogen production method has a greater impact on primary energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. At RH = 1.0, the greenhouse gas emission of coal-to-hydrogen is 2.1 times higher than that of the baseline system. The life cycle primary energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions of the wind-to-hydrogen are the smallest at RH = 1, which are 85.14% and 87.64% lower than that of the baseline system respectively. Additionally, when the hydrogen price is lower than 20 CNY/kg, the total life cycle cost is lower than that of the baseline system.