15 November 2023
Large scale green hydrogen plays a key role in meeting the CO2 emission reduction goals in the Climate Agreement – in particular in hard-to-abate sectors like the process industry. Therefore, ISPT’s Hydrohub Innovation Program initiated the development of the MegaWatt Test Center: an open innovation facility designed for experimentations in a wide operational window.
Together with HyCC, Shell, Nobian, Yara International, Yokogawa, Hanzehogeschool Groningen, TNO, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, Groningen Seaports, TKI Energie en Industrie we work hard to bring the testing facility at the energy testing ground of ENTRANCE – Centre of Expertise Energy alive.
We now have entered an exciting new phase where we are ready for starting-up our Alkaline and PEM electrolysers, marking the beginning of the research phase. To celebrate this milestone, we held a festive kick-off event with the consortium partners.
During the kick-off partners ENTRANCE, Nobian, Shell and TNO and ISPT took the stage and introduced the work to a larger audience. Together we looked at the current state-of-play in the hydrogen arena and discussed how market introduction projects at 10’s to 100’s of MWs are planned across Europe but only a few have taken FID. It was emphasized again that in starting up substantial scale projects (100MW+) you can only be successful if the whole end-to-end supply chain is covered. At the same time the need for innovation is stronger than ever.
There was unanimous agreement that we must learn by doing, and that the MegaWatt Test Center is a vital element in that process. Moreover, we all agreed that taking these steps together is key in making impactful progress while sharing costs and risks and learning from each other. This was stressed by Anne Arkenbout – site manager of Nobian who spontaneously exclaimed “We need a platform – someone who brings everybody together”. And for experiments at real electrolyser scale the Megawatt test center is just that!
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