Hydrogen Station Location Planning via Geodesign in Connecticut: Comparing Optimization Models and Structured Stakeholder Collaboration

Abstract

Geodesign is a participatory planning approach in which stakeholders use geographic information systems to develop and vet alternative design scenarios in a collaborative and iterative process. This study is based on a 2019 geodesign workshop in which 17 participants from industry, government, university, and non-profit sectors worked together to design an initial network of hydrogen refueling stations in the Hartford, Connecticut, metropolitan area. The workshop involved identifying relevant location factors, rapid prototyping of station network designs, and developing consensus on a final design. The geodesign platform, which was designed specifically for facility location problems, enables breakout groups to add or delete stations with a simple point-and-click operation, view and overlay different map layers, compute performance metrics, and compare their designs to those of other groups. By using these sources of information and their own expert local knowledge, participants recommended six locations for hydrogen refueling stations over two distinct phases of station installation. We quantitatively and qualitatively compared workshop recommendations to solutions of three optimal station location models that have been used to recommend station locations, which minimize travel times from stations to population and traffic or maximize trips that can be refueled on origin–destination routes. In a post-workshop survey, participants rated the workshop highly for facilitating mutual understanding and information sharing among stakeholders. To our knowledge, this workshop represents the first application of geodesign for hydrogen refueling station infrastructure planning.

Green Hydrogen and Social Sciences: Issues, Problems, and Future Challenges

“…In general, green hydrogen and its associated technologies such as fuel cells and their small-scale applications in the residential or transport sector are little known by the population in the context of energy production [30]. These studies have been executed in advanced countries, emphasizing the promotion and social benefits of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles [70,[76][77][78] and hydrogen service stations [72,79]. That is, surveying sociotechnological factors that affect their social acceptance [80].…”

“…Research on public policy and regulation of green hydrogen presents challenges in (a) infrastructure regulatory solutions, (b) improved technical analyzes on hydrogen and other e-fuels, (c) analyzes on socio-technical systems, (d) case studies on technologies available and (e) studies on the governance of renewable energy systems. Regulatory solutions refer to accounting for barriers to device deployment [56], such as service stations [72,79] and vehicle trade [51]. These challenges point to improving multi-criteria analyses, the Hydrogen Industry Development Levels Index [55] and the sustainable value approach extended to the study of more hydrogen production centers [54].…”

An Intelligent Site Selection Model for Hydrogen Refueling Stations Based on Fuzzy Comprehensive Evaluation and Artificial Neural Network—A Case Study of Shanghai

“…The site selection of HRSs involves the influence of various factors such as technology, economy and society. For a long time, establishing scientific and reasonable site selection criteria has been a problem academic circles are striving to solve [5,6]. In the past five years, various countries have begun to build HRSs on a large scale to promote the development of the HFCVs industry [1,[7][8][9].…”

“…The optimization goal is to minimize the total cost of HRS construction and operation [19], and establish a city HRS location and capacity calculation. Using the multi-dimensional particle swarm algorithm to solve the model [6,20,21], there are still a large number of studies focusing on the development of hydrogen energy vehicles and the construction of HRSs under the background of reducing energy consumption and carbon emissions, And the hydrogen safety research for risk assessment, etc. [22][23][24][25][26].…”