Enel Green Power’s hydrogen industrial lab wins IPCEI Hy2Tech funding

Enel Green Power’s Hydrogen Industrial Lab is among the winning Italian projects of IPCEI Hy2Tech funding from the €4.5 billion funds made available by the European Union to develop hydrogen-focused initiatives of strategic interest.

Enel Green Power’s Hydrogen Industrial Lab, conceived as part of Nexthy, the company’s initiative to accelerate the implementation of green hydrogen technologies and business, is an industrial-scale innovation laboratory to be built in Sicily between the municipalities of Sortino and Carlentini.

The laboratory will facilitate collaboration with start-ups and global players to develop, test and validate new technologies for the production and storage of green hydrogen in a business-integrated manner, to contribute to the cost reduction of this technology, which is necessary to foster the decarbonization of hard-to-abate sectors, i.e. those industries where direct electrification is not technically efficient or economically viable.

The unique infrastructure will be integrated with a 4 MW electrolysis system that will serve as a reference for innovative technologies.

This is an ambitious project that will guarantee a reduction in the CO2 emissions of the partners: thanks to the agreement with Sapio with the Industrial Lab NextHy, the green hydrogen produced will be used by companies that look to this renewable source as the solution for decarbonizing their production processes.

The laboratory will house experiments in the fields of electrolyzers, storage systems and accessory components such as compressors, instrumentation, valves, new materials and everything else needed to move hydrogen, and will be powered entirely by green energy through the Carlentini wind farm, which is connected to the electricity grid. This will allow those involved to test the efficiency and reliability of their electrolysis technologies and their ability to offer flexibility services to the grid. The aim is to accelerate the path to the sale and marketing of these technologies by offering partners an environment that is fully representative of the business in which they will be operating.

Salvatore Bernabei, CEO of Enel Green Power, said, “We are proud that Nexthy is among the strategic interest initiatives selected by the European Union in the prestigious IPCEI Hy2Tech area, which rewards the most innovative and promising hydrogen projects.”

Ernesto Ciorra, Chief Innovability Officer at Enel, said, “Here, the NextHy initiative, also through to the IPCEI Hy2Tech funding, will make it possible to work in the full spirit of Open Innovability®, with a unique infrastructure capable of connecting technology providers, industrial partners, system integrators, research centers, venture capitalists and start-ups from all over the world.”