As global industries race to decarbonize and transition to renewable energy, green hydrogen has become a central focus.
With its potential to serve as a clean energy carrier and feedstock for industrial processes, green hydrogen offers both opportunities and challenges. Companies pursuing hydrogen strategies must navigate complexity across the value chain—from electrolyzer design to supply chain resilience and operational reliability. Fortunately, advances in digital technologies are helping leaders address these challenges in more informed and agile ways.
Two key challenge areas: Electrolyzer optimization and supply chain resilience
Two challenges often dominate the conversation around scaling green hydrogen: the technical and economic optimization of electrolyzer systems, and the ability to build a flexible, resilient supply chain that can accommodate the inherent variability of renewable power.
When it comes to electrolyzers, improving performance involves more than just selecting the right technology stack. Companies must also optimize catalysts, membranes, balance-of-plant components, and long-term degradation profiles.
Digital modeling and simulation tools are helping engineers test configurations, evaluate performance tradeoffs, and inform critical design decisions, thus reducing time to market, mitigating risk, and improving ROI on large-scale infrastructure.
Ensuring safety is always a top priority. Engineers must evaluate process controllability, design electrolysis process start-up and shut-down procedures, and identify the safe operating envelope and operating procedures for the plant.
Meanwhile, the supply chain challenge is being reshaped by the intermittent nature of renewable energy sources. Unlike fossil fuels, solar and wind are not consistent—they vary daily, seasonally, or even across regions due to various weather patterns. This unpredictability can introduce production disruptions or underutilization of assets, unless buffered by smart design and storage strategies.
Planning for intermittency, storage, and uncertainty
Green hydrogen systems—particularly those converting hydrogen into secondary products like ammonia or methanol—require adequate storage to manage fluctuations in supply and demand. Storage provides what is often referred to as “capacitance,” a buffer that helps smooth operations and stabilize costs.
This is not a new concept; oil refineries, for instance, have long relied on extensive tank farms and even underground reserves to manage inventory. But the stakes are higher with green hydrogen due to the economics and scale of the infrastructure involved.
To manage this complexity, companies are turning to probabilistic modeling and scenario-based planning. These tools help operators and planners ask critical "what if" questions: What if solar output drops for a week? What if demand spikes unexpectedly due to seasonal fertilizer production? What if a geopolitical event disrupts component supply or market pricing?
By integrating historical data, weather patterns, and operational constraints into flexible simulations, leaders can better understand the required storage capacity, optimal plant sizing, and tradeoffs between capital investment and operational risk. These techniques are proving especially valuable for projects in remote or off-grid regions, where traditional energy system assumptions may no longer apply.
Global momentum: Examples from around the world
Green hydrogen innovation is progressing globally, with early adopters in regions such as Europe, China, and Latin America piloting large-scale projects. In Chile, for instance, one initiative is exploring the integration of wind and solar energy from across the country into centralized hydrogen and ammonia production. Given the country’s long, narrow geography, modeling regional weather variations and transmission constraints is essential to evaluating project feasibility.
Another example is a solution for a green hydrogen and ammonia plant in China from Envision Group—nicknamed “Dancing with Wind”—which demonstrates how integrated digital tools can coordinate multiple layers of plant design, operating conditions, and renewable variability to optimize ammonia production.
Universities and research organizations, particularly in Spain and other parts of Europe, are also playing a vital role. These institutions are developing new models using digital solutions and methodologies to evaluate lifecycle costs, sustainability metrics, and the dynamic behavior of hydrogen systems under real-world conditions.
Looking ahead: A data-driven approach to green hydrogen
The path to scaling green hydrogen is far from straightforward. But by leveraging digital tools—such as process simulation, multi-scenario planning and performance monitoring—companies can make smarter design choices, adapt to uncertainty, and build more resilient systems.
As costs come down and technology matures, these capabilities will be essential to unlocking the full potential of hydrogen. For energy leaders, the message is clear: tackling hydrogen’s complexity requires more than just capital investment—it requires a data-driven mindset and the ability to model the future before committing to it.
