Utility Ørsted is striding ahead with high-level plans to use offshore wind to power green hydrogen (H2) production, following funding from the Danish Energy Agency (DEA) to build a 2MW electrolysis facility at its Avedøre power plant, on the outskirts of Copenhagen, wired into a pair of coastal turbines.
The H2RES project, which is backed by some DKr34.6m ($5m) awarded under the DEA’s Energy Technology Development & Demonstration Programme, will use a pair of coastline-installed Siemens Games wind turbines to generate 600kg of H2 daily, enough to power 20-30 buses, with surplus for testing its use in trucks and taxis.
"Renewable hydrogen could potentially form a cornerstone of Denmark's ambition to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 70% in 2030 and of the transition to a world that runs entirely on green energy,” said Ørsted vice president Anders Nordstrøm, who heads up the utility’s H2 activities.
“Heavy road transport is one of the sectors which can be made greener by indirect electrification with hydrogen produced from renewable sources.
“However, renewable hydrogen is currently more expensive than hydrogen produced from gas or coal [so] it's important for us to be able to demonstrate the technology and gather experience, that will make it possible to scale up the technology and make it more efficient.”
Tejs Laustsen Jensen, CEO of Hydrogen Denmark – which along with Everfuel Europe, NEL Hydrogen, GreenHydrogen, DSV Panalpina and Energinet Elsystemansvar are partnering on the project – added: "The integration of energy from offshore wind into heavy transport is a main challenge in the green transformation. With H2RES, we'll have the possibility of testing how hydrogen and offshore wind can best complement each other.
“Both with each other, with the transport sector and the collective energy system. It's a very important step for hydrogen as a key technology in the green transformation.”
Orsted, a pacesetter in the global offshore wind development, has taken a spearheading role in the green H2 play, including leading the UK’s ambitious Gigastack project , which aims to dramatically reduce costs by manufacturing ‘stackable’ 5MW electrolysers in gigawatt-scale factories and then deploying them at “very large scale” to “exploit synergies” with gigawatt-scale offshore wind farms.
Avedøre is best-known for housing Ørsted's large biomass-fuelled combined-heat-and-power plant.
