The aim of this project is to investigate how hydrogen economy can cover in a sustainable way energy demands in remote areas. In order to investigate this two case studies were conducted. The case study of the island of Crete and the case study of the Karpathos and Kasos islands complex.

Both of these case studies deal with two remote areas in Greece who are not interconnected to the Main National Grid. According to the hypothetical scenario all electricity needs are being covered from Renewable Energy Sources such as Wind Power and Biomass and when needed, electricity produced from fuel cells power plants is used to cover excess demand. Additionally, hydrogen produced from renewables is used to cover the fuel demands of transportation means in both case studies. The option of using photovoltaics was not considered since they are very costly and add up to the already high cost of the installation and because they are not suitable for such big electricity production systems. This is also partly because of their low round trip efficiency when used in hybrid systems as you can see in our relevant section. It is clear that wind hybrid systems look much more appealing. Furthermore, we did not want to limit our study in places where the sun resource is abundant, creating also an analogy with isolated islands of Scotland.

We decided to focus on these two cases because of their differences. Crete is the biggest Greek island with high electricity and transportation demands. On the other hand Karpathos and Kasos are a complex of islands that have small electricity demand and very few transportation needs. Karpathos and Kasos are very close to each other. This added some interest in our case study since wind farms were designed for both islands and the power would flow from one island to the other or vice versa, according to the needs in any given moment. Secondly in Crete there is available a big amount of biomass potential (mainly from agricultural wastes). In order to exploit it, the existing diesel generators were scheduled to be modified into biomass plants. This was thought to be the most cost effective and sustainable solution for the upgrade of the Power Production System in Crete. Furthermore, the use of biomass plants ensured a more stabile system considering the frequency and voltage level.