Hydrogen storage in wind turbine towers

Modern utility-scale wind turbine towers are typically conical steel structures that could also be used to store gaseous hydrogen in what we have termed a hydrogen tower. This paper examines potential technical barriers to this technology and identifies a minimum cost design.We discovered that hydrogen towers have a “crossover pressure” at which the critical mode of failure crosses over from fatigue to bursting. The crossover pressure for many turbine towers is between 1.0 and $\text{1.5}\text{MPa}$ (approximately 10–$\text{15}\text{atm}$). The hydrogen tower design resulting in the least expensive hydrogen storage uses all of the available volume for storage and is designed at its crossover pressure. An 84-m tall hydrogen tower for a 1.5-MW turbine would cost an additional $83,000 (beyond the cost of the conventional tower) and would store $\text{940}\text{kg}$ of hydrogen at $\text{1.1}\text{MPa}$ of pressure. The resulting incremental storage cost of $88/kg is approximately 30% of that for conventional pressure vessels.