Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy SA has one eye on the future where its wind turbines could play a key role in creating hydrogen. The company, which earlier this year launched the world’s biggest wind turbine, plans to start a pilot project in Denmark to test how its machines could power production of the fuel seen as key to eliminating carbon emissions from transportation and heavy industries. The European Union has big plans for the clean-burning gas and the bloc placed it at the center of its Green Deal earlier this year.
The pilot project is under construction near Siemens Gamesa’s Danish headquarters in Brande, western Denmark, Chief Executive Officer Andreas Nauen said in an interview on Thursday. It will include a 3-megawatt wind turbine that will power a 400-kilowatt electrolyzer, a machine that separates the hydrogen atoms in water from oxygen atoms.
It could be a compelling model. Danish utility Orsted A/S is already exploring a number of hydrogen projects for its wind farms and Royal Dutch Shell Plc plans to produce the gas from a park it’s going to build off the Dutch coast. Making and selling hydrogen could provide a new source of revenue for wind projects that would offset the risk in the sometimes volatile electricity market.
BNEF projections of the cost of producing green hydrogen, when compared with hydrogen derived from natural gas.
No one before has used wind power alone, without a grid connection, to produce hydrogen, Nauen said. It’s a project that will provide insight that could be crucial to scaling up the technology to much larger turbines and wind farms both on land and at sea.
Earlier this year, Siemens Gamesa announced plans to build a 14-megawatt offshore turbine with a rotor diameter of 222 meters (728 feet), a few meters larger than the previous record.
The company expects to conduct testing at the hydrogen pilot from October to December and then start hydrogen production in January. A Danish hydrogen fuel company called Everfuel will distribute the gas for vehicles including taxis and buses to use in Copenhagen.