A New South Wales-based effort to develop renewable hydrogen storage solutions – including a 5kWh home solar storage system – has received $3.5 million in backing from green investment outfit Providence Asset Group.
Tamworth-based company H2Store is working on the technology in partnership with the University of New South Wales, which promises to overcome one of the key barriers to realising the potential of green hydrogen in Australia – storage and transportation.
“The biggest challenge with hydrogen is it is very low density, and it needs big storage tanks, which makes transporting it not viable,” H2Store’s Llewellyn Owens told the Northern Daily Leader last week.
“We’ve made a metal that absorbs the hydrogen and then releases it, which makes it very easy to transport. We’ve known that you can transport hydrogen this way for a while, but the metal had to be heated up to 300 to 400 degrees for the hydrogen to be released. This one basically operates entirely at room temperature.”
The UNSW said on Tuesday that the money from Providence Asset Group would be used to deliver phase one of the four-stage project, including the creation of a home hydrogen storage prototype to compete with – and even outperform – current home battery systems, like the Tesla Powerwall.
The team hopes to have a 5kWh home storage system prototype ready by the end of this year, and a product on the market late in 2020. This would be followed by a “ramped up” 15kWh commercial-scale storage system.
Read the full story on RenewEconomy’s sister site, One Step Off The Grid…
