Traceable Numerical Screening of PV, CSP, Geothermal and Waste Heat Recovery Pathways for Hydrogen Production

<jats:p>Comparing heterogeneous energy pathways through a single hydrogen output can be misleading when model scale, conversion physics and evidential quality differ between pathways. This study presents a traceable numerical screening framework for photovoltaic (PV), concentrated solar power (CSP), geothermal energy and waste heat recovery (WHR) using nine PV scenarios, nine CSP scenarios, six geothermal scenarios and six WHR scenarios generated with ANSYS-based thermal or thermal-fluid models and MATLAB/Python post-processing. The PV branch provides documented DC power estimates of 33.31–65.44 W, with a mean of 51.69 W. The thermal branches are analyzed separately: their turbine workbooks contain static pressure differences and a fixed volumetric flow calculation of 1.8044 cubic metres per second for every scenario, but no documented mass flow or enthalpy coupling to the upstream heat exchanger models, rotor torque or complete expansion states. The product of static pressure difference and volumetric flow is therefore retained only as a pressure-flow power-scale diagnostic, and the subsequent efficiency scaling is reported as an illustrative electrical equivalent rather than turbine output. Within the WHR diagnostic set, excluding the deliberate high-flow stress case reduces the mean electrical equivalent from 6.635 to 4.245 kW, showing a 56.3% sensitivity of the arithmetic mean to that single operating point. Hydrogen estimates for PV and hydrogen equivalents for the thermal diagnostics are reported in separate evidential classes and are not compared as technology performance. The numerical dataset does not demonstrate common capacity/resource normalization, grid independence, quantitative validation or a closed energy balance from thermal resource to turbine. The contribution is therefore methodological: a transparent screening architecture that preserves the physical meaning, scale, coupling status and evidence level of each quantity before any downstream interpretation.</jats:p>