DiviGas, Neste, Toyota, Ballard, COP26 pledges, PNNL, NREL, others are hot on hydrogen

Lastly, a look at the latest research on hydrogen from PNNL and NREL

First, in Colorado, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and clean hydrogen company Electric Hydrogen inked an agreement to develop high-performance electrolyzer components, helping to scale clean hydrogen and invent new opportunities for decarbonization. The three-year, $3.6 million collaboration will diagnose sources of degradation in commercial electrolysis cells and will validate advanced designs that use higher stack currents.

“Electric Hydrogen is engineering a high-performance product for water electrolysis—something that could scale up to significant commercial applications,” said Guido Bender, NREL principal investigator on the project. “NREL has pretty unique hardware for testing electrolyzer stacks; this will allow us to characterize efficiency, durability, and performance across a range of operating conditions.”

While the partnership will enable fundamentally new knowledge around renewable hydrogen technologies, other aspects feel like déjà vu: Several of the NREL and Electric Hydrogen team members were also behind the success of a long-lasting NREL-First Solar collaboration, which eventually commercialized cadmium telluride solar photovoltaics. The Electric Hydrogen collaboration hopes to repeat that remarkable progress by once again pushing the boundaries of upcoming technology, this time for renewable hydrogen, an energy resource that has the potential to decarbonize the highest polluting sectors.

More on the story here.

Secondly, in Washington, researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory developed a valuation tool that analyzes different energy storage technologies as part of an integrated and increasingly decarbonized energy system. Hydrogen energy storage is the latest addition to the modeling suite, and it brings a unique capability to the tool.

The Energy Storage Evaluation Tool (ESET) is a suite of modules and applications that utilities, regulators, vendors, and researchers can use to model, optimize, and evaluate various energy storage systems: hydrogen, pumped storage hydropower, microgrids, batteries, and thermal mass stored in buildings. The tool examines a broad range of use cases and grid applications to maximize energy storage system benefits from stacked value streams—multiple uses at the same time.

More on the story here.