Power-to-Hydrogen – Will Technology Development be Sufficient to Reach Economic Viability?
(Room D203, Elicium, Second Floor)
09 Jun 15
4:00 PM
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5:30 PM
Tracks:
Theme: The Big Carbon Question
Power-to-gas has attracted much interest in recent years, as it offers a link between existing power and gas infrastructures and hence could make growing renewable power generation available as fuel for applications such as mobility, heating and industry.
At the heart of any power-to-gas system is water electrolysis, used industrially to produce hydrogen for more than a century. However, to become a key ingredient in future energy systems, performance and system cost of electrolysers must improve.
In this paper, electrolyser technology status and development targets to 2020 and 2030 are presented, from extensive consultation with manufacturers, industry experts and researchers.
With these targets as inputs, and several use cases in different European markets as boundary conditions, hydrogen production costs were modelled. The results suggest that water electrolysis could be competitive with hydrogen production from SMR in very specific use cases with favourable regulatory environments. Electrolysis benefits from its suitability for decentralised production, for example at hydrogen refuelling stations. With suitable CO2 prices industrial uses can also become competitive. Specific sweet spots for system design and operational strategies were identified and described, such as maximising value streams from providing grid services.
Conversely, the results suggest that direct coupling with fluctuating renewables and arbitrage through re-electrification via a turbine is unlikely to be economic.
With successful cost reduction and system performance improvements, electrolysers could enter energy applications. With regulatory support, such as continued exemption from electricity levies or green certificates for electrolytic hydrogen, hundreds of installations and hundreds of MW of installed capacity around 2020-2025 appear possible.
This study was conducted by E4tech in collaboration with Element Energy and commissioned by the FCH-JU to inform their funding priorities.