thanks for your interest in small scale hydrogen projects. I will talk about the hydrogen conversion in my eyes, and I will describe 5 necessary steps. I would like to discuss at which point we are. I will show you an h2 example. i will show you our international hydrogen price list which is important if you are planning hydrogen projects, you need to know about prices. To make this a little bit more understandable I have here a traditional solar system which we designed for a family in central Germany, which consists of
an electrical solar array,
a thermal solar array,
a lithium Battery and a wall box.
This already contains the first three steps of the hydrogen conversion. First of all, you need space to put solar arrays on. Secondly you need PV systems to be set up. You can grid tie it. If this is not economically in your country, it would be preferable to have a battery. traditionally this would be a Lithium Battery. They have a high capacity. At the same time, they are quite expensive. to give you an idea about the prices here in Germany:
Lithium storage is more expensive than hydrogen
For less than 15 kWh Battery as a house bank we pay up to 20.000 Euro. With these we have 4.000 cycles. The charming thing about Hydrogen is, you can store much more Energy. We are not talking about 15 kWh; we are talking about 100 – 300 kWh from summer season by the conversion of hydrogen into so called Hydrogen cylinders or hydrogen bundles. So that is what you see here. I’ll try to explain the electrolysis process in this small example which makes it hopefully understandable for everyone.
How does the electrolyzer for small scale hydrogen projects work?
Here we have the electrolyzer which has several ports. In green you see the water supply. Which is basically the most important ingredients. That is where we separate the hydrogen from. This is connected to your grid and there is an automatic feed. We would recommend a prefilter. This is just a deionizer ingredient that deionizes the water in the first term. Because we use PEM electrolyzer’ s in our systems. This is the rough sketch of out electrolyzer it is square pardon it. There is a deionizer in the system which circulates all the time. The deionizer has to be changed from time to time. Besides the process the electrolyzer will produce heat.
It is very important that we get rid of this heat. That is the red and the blue pipe which goes directly into your buffer tank. Most buffer tanks of my clients have many ports. Some are used for thermal solar; some are used for the heater itself if it is a gas boiler or whatever. The heater will be traditionally far up because it has high temperatures. i would suggest to insert the electrolyzer waste heat to the bottom. We want the return to be as cold as possible. I gonna explain you why, because beneath the electrolyzer, there is the booster.
Hydrogen compression
The booster compresses the hydrogen. everybody of us knows that, if you compress hydrogen there will be heat. We want the hydrogen to be as cool as possible when it comes into the booster. We don’t want the hydrogen to get more than 100 °C. That is not only reducing the risk, it is also for the gasket. The gasket should not get warm because you know plastics don’t like heat. This is not like a car piston which iron. This is PTFE. Then the hydrogen comes out in a compressed stage that is what you see here, but actually it is simultaneously on the low-pressure side and the high pressure side and the high pressure side, which is yellow. One Bundle will be dedicated to the pre-pressurization. If we go to the bundle. Let us say this bundle here will be 120 bars and then there is a switch. It will re-compress these 120 to 300 bars. Which is the normal pressure for steel hydrogen cylinders.
Hydrogen converted combustion engines
This car we have here is a CNG converted car. In Germany it was once common to convert your car to Compressed Natural Gas. In Poland it is very common still. It depends on the CNG price at the gas station. This car can be converted to Hydrogen very easy. This car will be feed by this nozzle and only needs 250 bars max. of pressure. The thing I want you to know: the distance you can travel with this car is not that far as with gasoline. It might be on third of the range. There is the second most important thing is the renewable energies. The electrolyzer uses the energy from the PV array to make the hydrogen.
Redox Vanadium Flow Batteries fit best with small scale hydrogen projects
Here I want to present you a new kind of battery. Just to make you think about new technologies. This is a redox vanadium flow battery which is produced in Germany. The charming thing about it, it is not so expensive. You get 10.000 cycles. It is just fluids. It is a mechanical Battery, which is pumping fluids with different concentrations. This fits very well with the electrolysis process we offer. Because the disadvantage of RVF Battery is, it cannot handle high loads. You cannot take 120 A out of your Battery pack. If you want to talk in Watts: you cannot charge 6- 12 kW Wallbox to charge your electric vehicle. Therefor you can have a small led acid battery to be charged after being discharged for big electrical consumers.
What does it cost to make hydrogen?
With this in mind, of course money is a major subject I would like to present you the international hydrogen price list which you can have a look on the website in the members area. If you sign up in the members, are you will find, this table. I get a lot of questions of interested people. I want to explain how to use it. Now that you have seen all the components which are necessary, we look at the things you need for the hydrogen conversion. We come back to Heribert’s question. How many bundles it would be to have 700 kg of hydrogen. Here we have the hydrogen bundles, and they are available in 200 bars and 300 bars. It is indicated in the green row. If charged with 300 bars, they will have 21 kg of hydrogen. This is a 16 bottle 4 times 4 bundle. This is a 12. It would be economically to reduce your heat demand by insulating your house or doing something before that. Because to heat a non-insulated house with renewable is not realistic. Then we come to another point which is pretty interesting.
How big rooftop solar is necessary to make hydrogen?
The solar array size and the battery size. We see a big surface is dedicated to solar. This is a 20-kW peak solar array. We took all the place which was available. The power consumption of this machine will be around one kW. If you want to run it for 24 hours this will come to 24 kWh you need in stock. The sun maximum shines 12 hours a day at the equator for instance. We need to store at least 13 kWh. We are talking about big solar arrays. This is only for the hydrogen production.
What is the range of hydrogen cars with home hydrogen refueling
We calculated how much kilometers would you be able to go in one year if the electrolyzer has always the necessary energy. You would be able to run 12.000 kilometers a year. Which is ok, but most likely, because what happens in the energy management system, it will only activate the electrolyzer when the battery is full. There will be many times when you will charge your cars or cook or whatever. Or it is just dark for 3 days in Germany that is the way we calculate. No sunshine for three days. We had this this winter, and we will have this any winter. If you want to store lot of hydrogen. 24/7.
How much hydrogen can I produce?
You can stack this electrolyzer. You can put two on top of each other. It is a stackable system. The piping doesn’t show that yet. But then think about it the costs. One of these bundles will cost you 13.000 in France 10.000 in Czech Republic. For our system we start with hydrogen trailers, which are much cheaper. Because the 1.400 kg steel cage, which is really made to be transported every day. These are rental bundles. They are way to strong for a normal use. This trailer hold 12 kg of hydrogen and will cost you not even half of the French type bundle. And it is available quite close. We go to the last question:
What can we do with the hydrogen.
We presented the hydrogen converted car, but there are many other uses. To make the hydrogen transition with such big investments. I hope you understood now. To make it as easy as for the consumer which becomes a Prosumer by buying an electrolyzer is to make it small steps. Therefor I present you here now the easiest and cheapest way to make hydrogen a useful thing in your household. If you have stored your access solar energy in the bundles, you can easily buy a catalytic heater with hydrogen. Hydrogen passes through this catalytic net. It is dipped with thin particles of platinum and when the hydrogen touches the platinum it will react with the Oxygen in the surrounding and create heat. This is the easiest way to make hydrogen a useful thing.
Should I use hydrogen with fuel cells to make electricity againe?
Another topic I want to address is fuel cells. If you go back to the international hydrogen price list, you will find fuel cell prices. i want to point out why we didn’t launch our system on converting hydrogen back to electricity with fuel cells. This is a very good manufacturer. The Dutch company is so long in the business. It one of the best hydrogen fuel stacks you can get. They have a lifetime of 25.000 hours. Which means this huge investment has to be repeated every 3 Years. I mean for a hydrogen car, this is OK. The gasoline engine runs no more than 3.000 hours. But for an application in a household where the heater has to last for 20 years. This is not acceptable in my eyes. So I don’t want to make our customers take the wrong decision. Buy a system and every 3 Years they have to pay 7.000 Euro to get a new fuel stack.
By refreshing the catalysts an electrolyzer can last decades
What our electrolyzer producer does, it refreshes the catalyst but after 40.000 hours. 5 years max. runtime. Then you can use it again. It is a maintenance like an OIL change. If you look at this Chinese fuel cell. This is very powerful fuel cell. You will see this has only 500 start stop cycles. There are a lot of things fuel cells still have to accomplish.
Hydrogen generators instead of fuel cells?
We are thinking the easier method is really to use a generator at the beginning. You can convert the gasoline generator which costs you less than 1.000 € to hydrogen. And run it on hydrogen. Just put it next to your compressor in the outside. If you have no electricity in winter. Maybe the days in one season or maybe a week or maybe two weeks. Just use the hydrogen to make electricity through the traditional technology.
The hydrogen conversion kits for electric generators are sold for 40 €. It is CNG technology, but these are working with carburetors. There is no digital lambda measurement or anything. And of course if you want to be more efficient the manufactures of combined heat and power stations have all converted their former gasoline engines to hydrogen. Here are two companies who do that successfully. We have one hydrogen combined heat and power station, which is nothing else than a generator, just uses the heat of the cooling system. But this is a size they want to be more on a scale of district heating.
Highest value of hydrogen in small quantities is in cylinders
What we thought, the easiest thing to get it started because price vary a lot is first just use your access solar energy and make hydrogen and don’t think about the use of hydrogen. Even though we all know in the steps of the hydrogen transition the applications are key. But all this will be so expensive for a one time investment. We offer to connect buyers and consumers. There are already platforms which work on a much bigger scale in Düsseldorf for instance. Where you first produce hydrogen and then you sell the hydrogen with this income you can enlarge your system. You can increase.
You can start with one trailer in year one. You can start with 2 trailers in year two. With the revenue because the hydrogen in bottles is much more expensive. This statistic, these are suppliers for technical gases of cause you know air liquid and linde. The sell hydrogen up to 400 Euro a kg.
Hydrogen is sold for more than 100 € a kilogram
We connect you as a producer in the first stage of your hydrogen conversion and we sell it for instance for gas chromatography. The police has a gas chromatography and the pharma industry. They use tiny quantities of hydrogen to measure the conductivity of the gases they want to measure. this is called gas chromatography. But also for welding and here you find an entire list of industries which already use hydrogen. Like welding. It is used for welding stainless steel, not as a combustible but as inert, no, it is pushing away the air. Here you find a lot of consumers. So the traditional glas craft works with hydrogen. We think this makes the hydrogen transition much easier. I will point out the last point.
The return on investment of small scale hydrogen projects
I showed you how the system will run, I showed you approximately how much it will cost now it comes to the question: How long does it take until I make money with my hydrogen. I don’t have to spend for the grid power I use. Therefor we have an excel tool which calculates dynamically the amortization. The return on invest for your system you can use it for free on the site. It is always depending on your calculation. Like what do you think will be the price of gasoline. In this table you can type in your initial costs to start the system. You can put on the interest of your bank if there is any you have to take. This is the inflation rate. It will give you a graph and will show you at what point your system is getting on a positive side of the equation. If you consider smaller or big projects this is the VDI 2067. It is a cost benefit analysis.
Thank you so much for reading. We have to make our living by what we do. We want you to be energy independent. Energy is a gift and that is what we work for. The only thing we ask you is: share out content.
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