Potential of solar hydrogen production by water electrolysis in the NEOM green city of Saudi Arabia

Green hydrogen is one of the new and promising renewable energy sources, and there is a growing recognition that hydrogen will be the fuel of the future. While numerous methods may be used to manufacture hydrogen, only a few of them are ecologically benign. It is argued that solar hydrogen generated from water using solar energy is a leading candidate for renewable energy. Also, one of the most critical challenges facing green hydrogen is its production as an environmentally safe energy source. Moreover, there are several ways to produce it, including through solar panels alone. In this research, a review will be made of the most important research that has studied the production of green hydrogen using solar energy alone or using different sources of renewable energy so that the system becomes a hybrid. The HOMER Pro program makes a technical study of many scenarios and selects the best ones. In this research, the focus was on hydrogen production in the city of NEOM in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, because it is one of the most important pillars of Saudi Arabia's vision of 2030, and it will be the largest exporter of green hydrogen in the world. The HOMER Pro program was used to simulate hydrogen production through solar panels distributed over 100 square meters, and the amount of hydrogen produced was measured and compared with other cities in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Through simulation, it was concluded that the city of NEOM has high potential in the production of green hydrogen, due to several reasons, the most important of which is the amount of solar radiation falling on it, in addition to being close to a source of water for the process of hydrogen separation from water.