Hydrogen Battery "Sponges" Store Solar for the Grid

A novel task in Australia aims to harness the sun’s power in two unique techniques: by storing it and by making use of it to produce eco-friendly hydrogen.

Dozens of solar farms in the country’s southeastern region are slated to use “hydrogen batteries” in coming many years. The twin-objective units can fit inside of shipping containers and pack a bounty of technologies: lithium batteries, electrolyzers, gas cells, and canisters of a hydrogen-steel compound. Operators can use the devices to shop power from solar panels and produce energy to the grid through cloudy times or at night time. Or, they can provide the eco-friendly hydrogen to other industries, this kind of as cargo shipping and metal output.

At least that’s the vision Alan Yu and his partners share. Yu is CEO of Lavo, the Sydney-primarily based enterprise that makes hydrogen storage devices for utility and residential marketplaces. He’s also co-founder of the investment agency Providence Asset Team, which is acquiring solar energy initiatives in the states of Victoria and New South Wales. 

In early July, Providence Asset Team signed an agreement to market output from additional than 30 of its solar farms to SmartestEnergy Australia, a retail power company which is owned by the Japanese conglomerate Marubeni. Eleven of the solar initiatives are absolutely operational and the rest are envisioned to be up and functioning by early 2023. All together they’ll depict a 300-megawatt solar installation.

In the meantime, Lavo options to start function on its initially utility-scale trial device by the finish of this 12 months. Each and every hydrogen battery system—which it dubs HEOS—will supply about 13 megawatt-several hours of storage at the solar sites.

The initiative comes as the world electric power sector is clamoring for grid-storage remedies. The rise of intermittent renewables like solar and wind is driving a want for devices that can absorb excessive energy provides and discharge them at a moment’s notice, to match the ebb and flow of energy demand. By 2030, the world power storage market could see a 5-fold improve, from 800 gigawatt-several hours right now to as a lot as 4,000 gigawatt-several hours, in accordance to the U.S. Nationwide Renewable Energy Laboratory. (The figures involve each stationary storage installations and transportation apps, this kind of as electric powered vehicle batteries.)

At the identical time, eco-friendly hydrogen is attaining favor as a way to clean up extensive-length transportation, chemical production, aviation, and other sectors that are difficult to electrify. Estimates for eco-friendly hydrogen progress differ widely, and there’s tiny consensus as to what demand could possibly look like in coming decades, Canary Media not long ago documented. However, the Hydrogen Council said it expects eco-friendly hydrogen output to reach virtually 550 million metric tons by 2050—a sizeable leap from the approximately .36 million metric tons generated in 2019.

Lavo’s hydrogen battery aims to capitalize on each power traits, Yu said.

The procedure builds on many years of investigation at the University of New South Wales, which patented the hydrogen-steel compound—or steel hydride—technologies in 2019. Here’s how it performs: Photo voltaic panels feed electric power into the device and charge a 5 kilowatt-hour lithium battery. The moment the battery is absolutely billed, any added electric power runs by an electrolyzer, which splits h2o into hydrogen and oxygen. The oxygen is unveiled into the air, while the hydrogen flows into the steel canisters. Within the pink-top tubes, hydrogen is stored in a strong form by combining it with a fibrous steel alloy designed from popular minerals.

“Our extensive-duration storage can act as a solar sponge to absorb…to lower force and incorporate security to the grid,” Yu said.

The procedure also performs in reverse, converting the strong steel hydride back into hydrogen, which then runs by a gas mobile and provides electric power to the grid. Yu said the devices can produce additional than twenty,000 charge cycles, supplying the elements an envisioned life time of 30 years—about as extensive as a solar farm lasts. Alternately, the steel hydride canisters can be plucked out of the procedure and positioned on a truck or cargo ship for export.

Stored at home temperature and very low pressures, the canisters are safer and a lot easier to transportation than hydrogen which is stored in pressurized tanks or converted into ammonia, in accordance to Kondo-Francois Aguey-Zinsou, who has labored on the Lavo technologies and prospects the university’s Hydrogen Energy Investigate Middle in Sydney. 

Lavo began testing its initially prototype at the investigation centre last 12 months. That device is lesser than the ones that will operate at solar farms instead of a shipping container, it’s about the size of a double-doorway refrigerator. The technologies agency has begun advertising its additional compact variation for use in households and enterprises. With a storage capacity of about forty kilowatt-several hours, it purportedly stores a few instances as a lot power as Tesla’s Powerwall two. 

Yu said Lavo at first planned to commercialize its utility-scale models initially. But production delays and other disruptions because of to the Covid-19 outbreak spurred Lavo to pivot its emphasis to the household storage market. As the enterprise fills orders for the fridge-sized devices, it will also be acquiring the more substantial hydrogen batteries to roll out along with solar farms in southeastern Australia.