hydrogen

The green hydrogen production plant planned for the Lloseta industrial area will be a pioneer project for Spain and Europe, say regional government officials, and is scheduled to start operating from 2021.

Researchers from the Laboratory of Renewable Energy Science and Engineering at Switzerland’s Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne have developed a device which they say could “provide a pathway for device scalability aimed towards the large scale deployment of photo-electrochemical hydrogen production”.

The innovation is said to be able to produce 250 liters of hydrogen per day and can convert sunlight and water vapor from the air directly into hydrogen gas with an efficiency of 15%.

The energy company plans to build the “HySynGas” project in the Brunsbüttel Industrial Park with ARGE Netz and MAN Energy Solutions. The consortium wants to establish a power-to-gas hub for cross-sector decarbonization in northern Germany.

The Dutch Institute for Sustainable Process Technology has launched the Gigawatt Elektrolysefabriek project, which aims to produce green hydrogen at the gigawatt scale from wind and solar parks in the Netherlands.

Researchers at Stanford University have developed a type of electrode which is highly resistant to salt corrosion, therefore allowing them to produce hydrogen using seawater. Applied at a larger scale, this development could potentially cut the cost of power-to-gas applications by greatly increasing the amount of water available.

The new budget looks to lower the cost of energy for households by turning to distributed energy, energy efficiency and community energy programs. To this end, several billion Canadian dollars will be spent.

Toyota Australia will transform its former manufacturing site in West Melbourne into a renewable energy hub to produce green hydrogen with the help of funding from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA). In other hydrogen-related news, researchers at UNSW Sydney with partners H2Store have received a $3.5 million investment from Providence Asset Group to develop a hydrogen residential storage.

An international team of economists says power-to-gas may already generate hydrogen at costs competitive with fossil fuel power plants in Germany and Texas, provided certain production output levels are not exceeded. If medium and small power-to-gas is competitive, large-scale should be viable by 2030.

Researchers want to better understand how hydrogen atoms may improve the performance of phosphorus-doped polycrystalline silicon (poly-Si) films for passivating contact solar cells.