Why Customers Win with Hydrogen

You may have noticed an increase in articles and posts on the potential of hydrogen. It's because the generation and supply of hydrogen will be critical to meeting global low carbon targets in 2030, 2050 and beyond, and more oil, gas, power providers and governments are realizing its potential. In my opinion, it's going to be big and play a critical role among other cleantech such as renewable power and energy storage.

What makes hydrogen unique is that it can be made through several applications, in many situations and delivered or stored for need. It doesn't get stale or deplete in storage, and it will be affordable compared to more complicated alternatives. Affordability will be the biggest factor.

Naysayers point to the cost of making blue or green hydrogen today, but the incentives around the world have launched it. According to experts like US Dept of Energy, the cost of making green hydrogen may hit US$1 per kg by 2031.

In recent discussions with hydrogen fueling technologies, incentives mean that blue hydrogen is already $2 per kg, today.

Naysayers like to think that centrally distributed electricity is more efficient but fail to calculate loss in thermal energy and loss of electrons on its journey to and end customer. I'm not suggesting that behind the meter hydrogen generation and power production should replace local electricity, but there will be a balance as to when you use the power grid and when you use your hydrogen grid.

Consumers will be the biggest beneficiaries in the more direct use of hydrogen to power and heat their homes and buildings, as the all-in levelized cost of energy (making hydrogen and power island) is expected to be less than the cost of per kW from electric utilities today in many places in North America.

Personally, I would like to see more regulated electric and gas utilities work with the supply of hydrogen and on-site hydrogen powered systems for customers, which is why my company, Cleantech Power Corp., partnered with Festival Hydro to test our 4 kW fuel cell prototype later this year.

We recently announced a collaboration agreement with PowerTap Hydrogen Fueling Corp. to start assessing the ability to make our own low carbon hydrogen at a customer's site. We're already looking a number of potential sites.

While our fuel cell would still require cleaning up some corporate items in Belgium, we see a tremendous opportunity to support the use of internal combustion hydrogen engines for baseload power with fuel cells supporting back up and peaking requirements when required.

With the announcement of the roughly $13m acquisition of combined heat and power assets that also bring our sales pipeline to approximately $150m, it's an exciting time to use hydrogen generation at some or many of those sites and deliver low to no carbon long term power systems.

From a North American perspective, it is great that an existing delivery system (natural gas pipelines) already exist to convert natural gas to low to no carbon hydrogen, in the short term, and doing this conversion as close as possible to customers' sites mitigates further risks of having to transport hydrogen in natural gas pipelines to begin with. (original posted on LinkedIn)