SunHydrogen recently shipped four new modules to its pilot plant at the Hydrogen ProtoHub, which is co-managed by The University of Texas at Austin Centre for Electromechanics (UT-CEM) and GTI Energy.
Previously, in April, SunHydrogen CEO Tim Young issued a letter to shareholders which confirmed that performance did not meet the targets previously achieved in Iowa and validated by Honda R&D. This was traced to a specific substrate manufacturing process. A voltage decrease in the solar substrates impacted performance, while a coating degradation allowed water to penetrate the semiconductor layer. The company responded to this by producing new commercial scale reactors.
Since installation, the new modules have shown two weeks of consistent performance under real outdoor conditions. The new modules incorporate improvements the SunHydrogen team made after initial commissioning, and the data collected in Austin continues to guide the Company's engineering work as it moves its technology from controlled laboratory testing to outdoor operation.
On October 9, 2026, SunHydrogen President and CEO Tim Young spoke at UT Austin Hydrogen Days, held at the Hydrogen ProtoHub. Following his remarks, Mr. Young and Hans Peter Klein, US Managing Director, answered questions from attendees and led demonstrations of SunHydrogen modules producing hydrogen on site.
“Hydrogen Days gave us the chance to show people our technology working outside the lab” said Mr. Young. “Seeing the modules produce hydrogen in person, and answering direct questions about how they work, is the best way to explain what we are building. I want to thank Michael Lewis, Director of the Centre for Electromechanics at The University of Texas at Austin, and Austin Mabrey, Research Engineer and lead operator of the Hydrogen ProtoHub, for hosting us and for their continued support of our pilot plant. I also want to thank GTI Energy for its safety review and on-site systems integration support.”
In collaboration with CTF Solar GmbH, SunHydrogen has developed small scale modules using a new cell layout with improved solar cell output, a key metric for water splitting. In laboratory testing, these modules reached an active-area solar to hydrogen (STH) efficiency of 12.3 percent, measured at the Honda R&D Co., Ltd. research facility in Japan. This is up from the 10.8 percent STH efficiency Honda R&D previously validated for SunHydrogen.
“This result is evidence that our cell design work with CTF Solar can deliver higher efficiencies, and higher efficiency is a critical part of the path toward more economical hydrogen” added Mr Young. “Our next step is to carry these gains to larger prototypes, with the goal of eventually bringing them to the full size panels we are testing in Austin, which are designed to be manufactured commercially using existing manufacturing infrastructure. I want to again thank our investors for their patience and support. Moving from the lab to real world testing in Austin has brought challenges, which is expected for any new technology. Our team, together with our partners at The University of Texas at Austin, GTI Energy, CTF Solar and Honda R&D, is working through those challenges one by one. I am grateful for the commitment of our employees and partners, and I look forward to sharing further progress.”
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