H2Giga, one of the three selected hydrogen lead projects (H2Giga, H2Mare, TransHyDE) of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), has been launched. With more than 130 participating institutions from industry and research, H2Giga will develop the production of green hydrogen on an industrial scale.

The production of hydrogen from water and electricity, “electrolysis”, is a process that has been known for a long time with a technical maturity that increases rapidly in the last years for the three technologies (PEM, AEL, HTEL). The technology has to be made available on the GW scale in order to ensure the energy demand within the energy transition towards renewable hydrogen. However, electrolysers are currently still largely built with low-automation processes implying high costs and low production capacity. In this frame, the lead project H2Giga aims at advancing the industrialisation of the water electrolysis technologies for the production of “green” hydrogen by using renewable electricity sources. The main target is the industrial series production of the electrolysers with partners involved on the manufacturing technologies, automation, digitalisation and quality control methods for the production of electrolysers, so that the hydrogen market initiation is accelerated.

DECHEMA e.V. coordinates the exchange of partners from research and industry in the lead project H2Giga. It is intended to be the booster for the research and innovation in the implementation of green hydrogen, to leverage synergies between the three technologies and to overcome development hurdles. The goal of H2Giga is to lay the foundation for competitive production of green hydrogen on a gigawatt scale, so that this key energy carrier can become available and affordable within the energy transition.

EIFER participates in the lead project within the high temperature water electrolysis technology (HTEL). EIFER’s contribution relates on one side to the development of the innovative cell and stack modules and on the other side to the understanding of the degradation mechanism in order to improve the reliability of the system. By that, EIFER is partner within the H2Giga/ HTEL stacks and DegradEL3 sub-projects starting from April 2021 up to March 2025. The coordinator for HTEL stacks and DegradEL3 is Sunfire and Dechema DFI, respectively. The partners are from research and Industry with Kerafol GmbH, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, DLR, Fraunhofer IKTS, Xenon GmbH, Kontron AS GmbH, ZBT, Fraunhofer IPA etc. The funding for the two sub-projects amounts a total of around 1.5 M€. The expected outcome is a knowledge advances in terms of degradation in the three technologies as well as the contribution to cell/stack performance and durability.

About the hydrogen lead projects:
The BMBF-funded hydrogen lead projects are the result of an ideas competition: research, industry and civil society were invited to submit ideas for large-scale hydrogen projects for a total of about 740 million euros funding. In this way, more than 240 partners have come together and selection has been made towards the three most suitable projects for advancing the energy transition. In spring, the projects were launched on the basis of non-binding funding prospects for a period of four years. Further information is available at http://www.wasserstoff-leitprojekte.de.

Contact: news@eifer.org

Source: Projektträger Jülich im Auftrag des BMBF