Green hydrogen startup spotlight: Power to Hydrogen

Heather Johnstone spotlights Power to Hydrogen, a new venture that is cutting the costs of green hydrogen production via innovative electrolyser solutions.

Green hydrogen has enormous potential in helping Europe and the rest of the world decarbonise, especially in hard-to-abate sectors, such as heavy industry or heating. But realising this is not without its challenges and one of the most significant is the high cost of green hydrogen compared to either grey or blue.

Having said that, BloombergNEF released a study earlier this year that concluded the sky-rocketing gas prices, brought on by the war in Ukraine, may already mean that green hydrogen is now at cost parity.

According to its Ukraine War Makes Green Hydrogen Competitive study, grey hydrogen now has a levelised cost of $6.71/kg in the EMEA region, while for green or renewable hydrogen it’s $4.84-6.68/kg. Although positive news, we must not allow it to mask what we need to do.

If we’re serious about green hydrogen being a vital part of our energy mix going forward, its cost cannot be dependent on the price of gas (sound familiar?). It must become cost competitive in its own right by bringing its levelised cost down to below $2/kg by 2030.

No easy feat, but it is here where innovation and innovators have a vital role. So the cost challenge remains. However, who doesn’t enjoy a challenge?

Power to Hydrogen - highly commended for their inventiveness in the Enel Green Hydrogen Challenge earlier this year - certainly does.

Power to Hydrogen was crowned the overall winner of the Challenge, which sought to identify disruptive production technologies that would contribute to achieving green hydrogen competitiveness.

Also of interest:
Why Europe’s head start on hydrogen is at risk
Energy Transitions Podcast: Lessons from a Danish hydrogen pilot project

To learn more about the company and their innovative solution, I spoke to Chris Holt, Power to Hydrogen's Co-Founder and COO:

What is your green hydrogen solution and what are its USPs?

Power to Hydrogen’s electrolysers are making low-cost, clean hydrogen a reality for users across the globe. Our company’s advanced, IP-protected AEM electrolyser design and materials create a system that produces zero emission hydrogen efficiently from water and renewable energy sources.

Commercially available electrolysers are either low-cost (alkaline) or integrate well with renewable energy (PEM), not both. Our AEM electrolysers solve this problem by using low-cost abundant materials and integrating easily with variable renewable energy, allowing us to produce hydrogen for the lowest cost from electrolysis.

In addition, our advanced designs allow us to capture hydrogen and oxygen at higher pressures (up to 250 bar). This creates additional economic benefits for users of high-pressure hydrogen (e.g. ammonia production, refuelling stations and on-road transport of hydrogen) and users of pure oxygen in an industrial process, such as glass production, steelmaking or electro-fuels production.

How does your solution genuinely contribute to the successful transition to a low-carbon future?

For clean hydrogen to reach its decarbonisation potential, it must be produced for under $2/kg. For electrolysers to achieve this milestone, they must be low-cost and able to integrate with affordable, renewable energy.

Alkaline systems struggle to integrate with renewables, PEM electrolysers are far too expensive, and Solid Oxide electrolysers have both problems. AEM electrolysers have the potential to solve these critical cost problems, and we’re bringing them to market at a multi-MW scale in the next 12-18 months.

What have the milestones been so far, and what are the next ones?

Getting our first product into the field with Enel Green Power has been one of our most important milestones to date. From our research, this will only be the second AEM electrolyser ever installed commercially across the globe. To get here, we needed a variety of different commercial and funding partnerships with leaders in the field.

The US Department of Energy and NASA gave us our first grant funding to develop the technology. After that, the Shell GameChanger programme helped fund the technology scale-up to a prototype unit.

We also raised our seed round of equity investment last year from a strategic automotive partner. Most recently, we’ve just won a US ARPA-E grant to continue pushing our hydrogen production pressure to above 250 bar. Moving forward, we’re raising our Series A round of investment and scaling our technology from microgrid to industrial size (multi-MW) next year.

What words of wisdom do you have for other start-ups beginning their entrepreneurial journey?

Listen to customers, be ready to pivot, but also understand that successful execution will be about which trade-offs you accept. Without interviewing customers and understanding their problems, finding valuable product-market fit will be like finding a needle in a haystack.

As you continue to interview customers in your commercialisation process, it is possible the solution/product you planned no longer makes sense. Listen to that feedback and be ready to adapt course if necessary.

While flexibility is critical, you also must employ it with caution. You will rarely be able to deliver everything a customer wants in your MVP. While you must listen to customers, you also need to protect against taking on too much for your team to execute well. A balance of customer empathy, flexibility and focus on core goals will pave the way to success.