The funding has been secured as part of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) Hydrogen Supply Competition, which looks at ways to accelerate the development of low carbon hydrogen supply solutions.
The aim of the project is to identify opportunities to reduce the cost of producing hydrogen through the process of electrolysis, making it a more viable option for the UK’s energy system and for decarbonizing industry.
Dr. Graham Cooley, CEO, ITM Power said, “The Gigastack Project seeks to significantly lower the cost of producing green hydrogen by scaling the individual electrolyzer stacks and the production process to 1GW (1,000 MW) of electrolysis per annum. We are delighted to be working on this important initiative, backed by the UK Government, with Ørsted the largest supplier of offshore wind in the UK.”
The project aims to dramatically reduce the cost of electrolytic hydrogen through:
• Development of a new 5MW stack module design to reduce material costs.
• A new semi-automated manufacturing facility with an electrolyzer capacity of up to c. 1GW/year to increase throughput and decrease labor costs.
• Deployment of very large scale and low cost 100MW+ electrolyzer systems using multiple 5MW units.
• Innovations in the siting and operation of these large electrolyzers to exploit synergies with large GW scale renewable energy deployments.
In Phase One, ITM Power will develop the designs and finalize the material requirements to deliver a low-cost 5MW stack, as well as refining concepts to maximize the throughput of the proposed semi-automated manufacturing facility to meet the demands of bulk hydrogen supply.
Ørsted will investigate potential synergies between offshore wind farms and electrolyzers to identify scenarios that can provide affordable electricity and a sufficient load factor to allow economic operation of the electrolyzers.
Finally, Element Energy will conduct market analysis of potential end users, explore business models and define a roll-out strategy for the first 100MW electrolyzers.
