"This demonstration project highlights how surplus renewable energy can be used to create and store clean renewable hydrogen to help sustainably meet our country's growing energy demands," said Jawaad Malik, chief strategy and sustainability officer at SoCalGas. "Continued advances in long duration storage technologies could play a crucial role in supporting on-site clean energy systems and offer an additional path to help accelerate the decarbonization of hard to electrify industries."
The demonstration project will use renewable energy sources like solar and wind to convert water into clean renewable hydrogen through an electrolyzer. Up to 500 kilograms of hydrogen can be stored in GKN Hydrogen's storage system in a solid state by binding the molecules in a metal hydride at low pressure without the need for compression. The hydrogen can then be used in an on-site fuel cell to create zero-emissions electricity.
"We believe that hydrogen has the potential to revolutionize the energy sector, and our solutions are designed to make this transition as seamless as possible," said Jim Petrecky, chief operating officer at GKN Hydrogen. "Our storage systems promise significant potential benefits in the areas of safety, footprint, and operational and maintenance costs. Evaluating commercial use cases will be key to identifying deployment strategies as the hydrogen economy continues to scale up and production costs continue to fall."
Utilizing NREL's Advanced Research on Integrated Energy Systems (ARIES) platform, researchers aim to validate a variety of commercial and industrial decarbonization applications. The exact use case depends on the system's integration, which could include solar, electrolyzers, battery storage and fuel cells with distribution equipment.
"The ARIES platform and infrastructure in Colorado aims to help accelerate the deployment of innovative energy technologies related to renewable energy, storage solutions and interactive loads. By integrating GKN Hydrogen's storage solution and collaborating with major utilities like SoCalGas, we are developing solutions to tackle the complexities of modern energy systems," said Katherine Hurst, NREL's principal investigator for the project. "This project will be the world's largest hydrogen storage system connected to renewable energy, and the findings could be integral to advancing the interoperability of hydrogen technologies and renewable energies at scale."
The U.S. Department of Energy's Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technologies Office provided $1.7 million in funding to NREL to deploy GKN Hydrogen's innovative hydrogen storage subsystem. SoCalGas provided $400,000 of research, development and demonstration funding to the project and will help identify potential commercial use cases. The project is scheduled to run until December 2026.
