(Finance) – TheHydrogen Industrial Lab from Enel Green Power it is among the Italian projects benefiting from the funding IPCEI Hy2Techthe fund with a total endowment of 4.5 billion euros made available by the European Union for the development of initiatives of strategic interest focused on hydrogen. Enel Green Power’s Hydrogen Industrial Lab, conceived as part of Nexthy, the initiative of the company created to accelerate the implementation of green hydrogen technologies and business, is an industrial-scale innovation laboratory that will arise in Sicily between the municipalities of Sortino and Carlentini (SR).
“We are proud that Nexthy is among the initiatives of strategic interest selected by the European Union as part of the prestigious IPCEI Hy2Tech, which rewards the most innovative and promising hydrogen projects. This platform will be the ideal place to create virtuous synergies with the world of start-ups and research excellence and respond to one of the main challenges facing Europe: reducing dependence on fossil fuels and accelerating decarbonisation ” he declares Savior BernabeiCEO of Enel Green Power.
“Just as Silicon Valley is the best place for digital, Etna Valley is becoming the ‘Energy Valley’, which is the best place for the world energy revolution. Here the NextHy initiative, also thanks to the IPCEI Hy2Tech funding, will make it possible to work in the spirit of Open Innovability®, with a unique infrastructure capable of connecting technology suppliers, industrial partners, system integrators, research centers, venture capitalists and startups. -up around the world. An ecosystem, with the aim of accelerating the development of green hydrogen production technologies. Open Innovability for us is the answer to climate change: sharing the technological and social challenges that this entails with innovators from all over the world to, all together, manage an energy transition towards a way of generating and distributing energy that is truly sustainable “, comments Ernesto CiorraChief Innovability officer of Enel.
The laboratory will facilitate the cooperation with startup And global players to develop, test and validate new technologies for the production and storage of green hydrogen in an integrated way with the business, with the aim of contributing to the reduction of the costs of this technology, necessary to favor the decarbonization hard to abate sectors, i.e. those industries in which direct electrification is not technically efficient or economically convenient. L’infrastructureThe only one of its kind will be integrated with a 4 MW electrolysis system that will serve as a reference for innovative technologies.
This is an ambitious project that will guarantee a reduction in the CO2 emissions of the partners: thanks to the agreement with Sapioin fact, with the NextHy Industrial Lab, the green hydrogen produced will be used by companies that look to this renewable source as the solution for the decarbonisation of their production processes.
The laboratory will host experiments in the fields of electrolyzers, storage systems and accessory components such as, for example, compressors, instrumentation, valves, new materials and all that is necessary to move the hydrogen and will be powered completely by green energy through the Carlentini wind power plant, connected to the eletricity grid. This will allow stakeholders to test not only the efficiency and reliability of their electrolysis technologies, but also their ability to offer flexibility services to the network. The goal is to accelerate the path to marketing of these technologies, offering partners an environment that is fully representative of the business in which they will operate.
The Hydrogen Industrial Lab represents the Group’s contribution to the development and innovation of technologies related to production of green hydrogen. To allow this technology to contribute in the medium and long term to fight the change climatic, innovation will join the scale-up of the electrolyser industry. As the Green Hydrogen Factbook produced by Enel, currently 99% of hydrogen is still produced globally by fuels fossils. A trend that can only be reversed through a concrete commitment to test innovative solutions capable of reducing the costs of producing green hydrogen. On this front too, the Enel Group is doing its part by developing projects in various countries around the world, including Chile, Spain, the United States and Italy, with precisely this objective.