ITM Power receives award from BEIS
The award for the Gigatest project is for £ 9.3m and follows initial designs developed through previous BEIS funding competitions.
The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) has awarded ITM Power a contract, under its Net Zero Innovation Portfolio Low Carbon Hydrogen Supply 2 Competition, to accelerate the commercial deployment of ITM Power’s 5 MW Gigastack platform and its manufacture.
The 5 MW Gigastack platform sits at the heart of the Group’s technology roadmap. Development commenced in 2019 with the completion of a feasibility study funded by the BEIS Low Carbon Hydrogen Supply Competition. This was followed by a second phase, also funded by the BEIS Low Carbon Hydrogen Supply Competition and covered two streams: a Front-End Engineering Design (FEED) study for a 100 MW deployment at Philips66 and Orsted in the Humber region and the development and validation of the Gigastack platform. The second phase concluded in 2021.
As announced in the half-year results in January, the testing programme for the 5 MW Gigastack platform includes both component level and full-scale evaluation. Gigastack is 2.5 times larger than ITM Power’s previous state-of-the-art stack platform, and it will undergo rigorous testing in representative conditions to validate the performance through real-world conditions, ensuring the technology is ready for large-scale commercialisation. This 4th-generation stack has multiple competitive advantages including lower capital costs and a smaller system footprint. These advantages will enhance the stack’s ability to operate under flexible conditions when coupled to renewable energy sources, producing green hydrogen at low cost.
Gigatest will also enable the deployment and validation of key manufacturing equipment at the existing Gigafactory and the second, more automated facility on which construction commences later this year. This validation will contribute to the subsequent initiation of semi-automated mass-production of electrolyser stacks.
Graham Cooley, CEO, said, “The UK Government has put green hydrogen at the centre of its plans to achieve its legislated Net Zero targets. This was underlined by the recent doubling of green hydrogen to 5 GW in the Energy Strategy published last month.”
Greg Hands, Energy Minister at BEIS, added, “The UK is truly leading the world in hydrogen innovation thanks to the exciting efforts of companies like ITM Power.”
