£7.5m awarded for renewable energy scheme
Funding of £7.5m has been awarded for the next phase of Gigastack, a renewable hydrogen project, as part of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Hydrogen Supply Competition.
Gigastack, led by Sheffield-based ITM Power, Ørsted, Phillips 66 Limited and Element Energy, will show how renewable hydrogen derived from offshore wind can support the UK’s 2050 net-zero greenhouse gas emission target.
By using renewable electricity, such as from an offshore wind farm, the process of producing hydrogen from water (electrolysis) can be decarbonised.
Energy-intensive industries and the transportation sector will have the opportunity to reduce the carbon intensity of their fuels by using renewable hydrogen.
As part of the feasibility phase of Gigastack, ITM Power developed designs for a low-cost modular 5 megawatt (MW) electrolyser ‘stack’.
The firm collaborated with Ørsted to understand the potential synergies with offshore wind farms and with Element Energy to explore business models for the first industrial-scale 100MW electrolysers.
For the second phase, the consortium will conduct a Front-End Engineering Design study on a 100MW electrolyser system using staged installations with a nominal capacity of 20MW.
The study will detail the design of a hydrogen production system connected to a wind farm and industrial off-taker using ITM Power’s new generation of electrolyser stack technology, renewable energy from Ørsted’s Hornsea Two offshore wind farm, with the resulting renewable hydrogen supplied to Phillips 66 Limited’s Humber Refinery.
A key objective of Gigastack is to identify regulatory, commercial and technical challenges for real applications of industrial-scale renewable hydrogen systems.
ITM Power will also install and trial both its next-generation electrolyser stack and the semi-automated manufacturing machines required for large-scale and high-volume manufacture of these new large low-cost stacks.
This will help validate a production system capable of delivering hundreds of megawatts of electrolysers per year.
Dr Graham Cooley, CEO of ITM Power, said: “The second phase of Gigastack includes stack scale-up, volume manufacturing and a FEED study for a refinery deployment.
“The project will result in a scalable world-class product for the production of low-cost renewable hydrogen.”
