With an assist from a $1.7 million U.S. Department of Energy grant, German firm GKN Hydrogen Corp. and Southern California Gas Co. are partnering with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory to build an innovative hydrogen-storage subsystem at NREL’s Flatirons Campus.
GKN Hydrogen’s storage solution, known as HY2MEGA, “can enable safe, long duration clean energy storage without the need for compression,” according to a company news release. “At scale, this combined technology could provide resilient power in case of widespread outages. It also highlights the technologies needed to reach carbon neutrality and accelerate clean fuel initiatives.”
The new system will connect to an electrolyzer and fuel cell at the NREL’s Advanced Research on Integrated Energy Systems (ARIES) facility. That fuel cell “will then convert the green hydrogen to produce renewable electricity,” the release said. “The two HY2MEGA’s will add an additional 500 kgs of hydrogen storage on site.”
The three-year project is set to begin at the end of this year.
“This project is exactly what the ARIES platform was designed for: demonstrate the benefits of a new technology that efficiently stores energy produced from renewable electricity,” Katherine Hurst, group manager and research scientist at NREL, said in the release. “It brings together a national laboratory, a clean energy technology developer, and a large utility to work on solutions that help decarbonize the power grid. We are looking forward to working with GKN Hydrogen and SoCalGas to advance this technology.”
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