Hydrogène de France (HDF) becomes a French industrial company by launching its high-powered fuel cell production plant in Bordeaux. This plant, with an annual production capacity of 50 MW, will be the first in the world to mass produce high-powered PACs (greater than 1 MW) using PEM (Proton Exchange Membrane) technology. The industrialization and standardization of these systems reduces their cost and improves significantly their reliability and maintenance.
This plant will produce under the brand name “HDF Industry”. It will integrate the Fuel Cell stacks of Canadian company Ballard, which today has the most widely deployed technology in the world. This exclusive worldwide agreement allows HDF to offer high-powered FCs whose performance and prices are adapted to the energy market.
A worldwide ambition
HDF intends to play a pioneering role in the emerging hydrogen market. Hydrogen, considered by both industrialists and governments as one of the solutions for the energy transition, is developing in multiple directions, including mobility as well as stationary applications.
HDF’s vision is based on the development of hydrogen as a fuel and a vehicle for storing electricity. Renewable energies have conquered a place in the world of energy by overcoming the challenge of competitiveness. HDF believes that the time has come to take on the next challenge, that of intermittency.
An industrial reality
HDF started its industrial program 3 years ago consulting the world’s leading fuel cell companies. Ballard was selected as being the ideal partner, as they have demonstrated their experience, industrial capacity and stack lifetime. HDF’s industrial plan has been developed with the ClearGen and CEOG projects and with the expertise of its employees.
The HDF Industry plant will have a production capacity of 50MW of Fuel Cell per year within 5 years.
Benefiting from Ballard’s know-how and HDF’s unique experience in industrial hydrogen projects, this French multimegawatt fuel cell plant has a sizeable lead in the market.
Damien Havard, President and Founder of HDF:
We are particularly pleased with this cooperation with Ballard. HDF industrializes reliable FCs at a price adapted to the market. The standardization of this strategic brick will allow the production of non-polluting and competitive electricity on a large scale. HDF provides the industrial solution that was missing to develop the massive storage of renewable energy. Our market is huge: this is the end of the intermittency of renewable energies!
About Hydrogène de France: industrialist and developer of Renewstable® power plants
A specialist in hydrogen technologies, HDF develops, finances, builds and operates multimegawatt industrial power generation infrastructures.
A pioneer in its sector of activity, HDF achieved a world first in 2019 in Martinique, the ClearGen project: the installation and commissioning of a high-powered fuel cell (1 MW), using the hydrogen co-produced by the SARA refinery by transforming it into electricity. This project is funded by Europe (FCH-JU) and SARA.
HDF marketed the Renewstable® power plants, which capture intermittent renewable energy and store it massively in the form of hydrogen to produce stable, 24-hour electricity that can be controlled like a thermal power plant at a competitive price. The first Renewstable® power plant is developed in French Guiana, in collaboration with the French infrastructure fund Meridiam and SARA: the CEOG power plant is the largest in the world storing massively renewable energy via hydrogen, to produce stable and non-polluting electricity day and night for 10,000 households. CEOG will start its construction site in early 2020 and produce its first electrons in early 2022.
As an international player, HDF Energy currently has around ten Renewstable® projects in the advanced development phase in several countries.
– HDF Energy website: www.hdf-energy.com
– HDF Industry website: www.hdf-industry.com
– CEOG Power Plant Website: www.ceog.fr
References:
Los Angeles wants to build a hydrogen-fueled power plant burning a mix of 30% hydrogen and 70% gas to power turbines.
Source: https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2019-12-10/los-angeles-hydrogen-fueled-intermountain-power-plant
Why turbines and not fuel cells?
From the same source:
“Bloomberg New Energy Finance, recently projected the costs of renewable hydrogen production will fall from $2.50-$6.80 per kilogram in 2019 to $1.40-$2.90 by 2030. By mid-century, costs could fall to $0.80 per kilogram”
“Just 253 megawatts of renewable hydrogen projects have been deployed over the last two decades”
“But by 2025, another 3,205 megawatts of electrolyzers to produce “green hydrogen” will be deployed”