Southern California Gas Co. (SoCalGas) and GKN Hydrogen announced the commissioning of a research demonstration project with the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) on an innovative clean renewable H₂ storage solution. The project, which will be located at NREL's Flatirons Campus in Arvada, Colo., uses GKN Hydrogen's storage technology to store H₂ in a solid state (metal hydrides) compared to traditional gaseous storage tanks.

The demonstration aims to evaluate the technology's performance and integration with clean energy systems, such as microgrids or fuel cells. The project also aims to identify the most beneficial uses of solid-state storage of clean renewable H₂. At scale, this technology could help accelerate the transition to a net-zero emissions economy by increasing the availability of resilient, onsite renewable power generation and storage.

"This demonstration project highlights how surplus renewable energy can be used to create and store clean renewable H₂ to help sustainably meet our country's growing energy demands," said Jawaad Malik, chief strategy and sustainability officer at SoCalGas. "Continued advances in long duration storage technologies could play a crucial role in supporting onsite clean energy systems and offer an additional path to help accelerate the decarbonization of hard-to-electrify industries."

The demonstration project will use renewable energy sources like solar and wind to convert water into clean renewable H₂ through an electrolyzer. Up to 500 kilograms of H₂ can be stored in GKN Hydrogen's storage system in a solid state by binding the molecules in a metal hydride at low pressure without the need for compression. The H₂ can then be used in an onsite fuel cell to create zero-emissions electricity.

"We believe that H₂ has the potential to revolutionize the energy sector, and our solutions are designed to make this transition as seamless as possible," said Jim Petrecky, chief operating officer at GKN Hydrogen. "Our storage systems promise significant potential benefits in the areas of safety, footprint, and operational and maintenance costs. Evaluating commercial use cases will be key to identifying deployment strategies as the H₂ economy continues to scale up and production costs continue to fall."

Utilizing NREL's Advanced Research on Integrated Energy Systems (ARIES) platform, researchers aim to validate a variety of commercial and industrial decarbonization applications. The exact use case depends on the system's integration, which could include solar, electrolyzers, battery storage and fuel cells with distribution equipment.

"The ARIES platform and infrastructure in Colorado aims to help accelerate the deployment of innovative energy technologies related to renewable energy, storage solutions and interactive loads. By integrating GKN Hydrogen's storage solution and collaborating with major utilities like SoCalGas, we are developing solutions to tackle the complexities of modern energy systems," said Katherine Hurst, NREL's principal investigator for the project. "This project will be the world's largest H₂ storage system connected to renewable energy, and the findings could be integral to advancing the interoperability of H₂ technologies and renewable energies at scale."

The U.S. Department of Energy's H₂ and Fuel Cell Technologies Office provided $1.7 MM in funding to NREL to deploy GKN Hydrogen's innovative H₂ storage subsystem. SoCalGas provided $400,000 of research, development and demonstration funding to the project and will help identify potential commercial use cases. The project is scheduled to run until December 2026.