Utility interface with hydrogen energy and transportation applications likely will develop as an offshoot of the push toward greater use of renewable energy resources, according to a panel of speakers at the National Hydrogen Association’s annual meeting Thursday in Los Angeles.

Most of the utilities right now are looking at hydrogen from the standpoint of determining how it is going to affect them, said the panel moderator, Bud Beebe, a regulatory manager with the Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD), one of the nation’s largest local government-run utilities. “What they should be doing is determining how they can affect hydrogen’s development.”

Among European utilities, hydrogen is being viewed as a “way to bring renewables to the transportation sector,” said Sergio Castedo, a former Enron Wind engineer who is now technical director for Statkraft, a Norwegian electric utility. “We want to be a European leader in hydrogen production for renewables,” said Castedo, noting that Norway is Europe’s largest natural gas producer. Electricity demand nationally in Norway — some 9,000 MW — is met entirely through hydroelectricity and increasing, but still small, amounts of wind power.

Ultimately, the combination of using natural gas, electricity and hydrogen is a goal that many of the Nordic and other European nations share, he added.

In the United States, Arizona Public Service’s Ray Hobbs, a senior consulting engineer for renewables, said his company is part of the ongoing Department of Energy (DOE) program gearing up to develop so-called “power parks” in which electricity and hydrogen can be produced with the latter being used in transportation. Hobbs said the DOE program has what he called “some incredibly ambitious goals” to develop hydrogen that costs $2.50/kilogram (kg) with a 73% energy efficiency factor.

Nevertheless, he said two of three major technical barriers facing the power parks’ development are the costs and efficiency ratios, along with grid emissions from using a hydrogen-natural gas fuel blend in internal combustion engines rather than fuel cells.

In a separate research project by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden, CO, the concept of producing and storing hydrogen as an offshoot of wind farms has been examined on a theoretical, lab-level with indications demonstration projects might be pursued.

In its analysis as part of NREL’s larger WindSTORM study, researchers found that even with a 45% increase in the cost of the strengthening and other modifications of a wind turbine tower, at 85 meters height, the equivalent of 16-1/2 hours of wind turbine capacity can be stored as hydrogen. It was unclear whether retrofits could be done economically, but theoretically the new construction wind turbine towers could prove cost-effective, according to NREL’s cost analysis and conceptual design.

Another aspect covered by another panelist was grid interconnection rules, viewed as the largest barrier to distributed generation applications, which can include both renewables and hydrogen. Christopher Cook, a Maryland-based consultant with E-3 Energy Services, outlined several national efforts by the federal government and professional associations to simplify interconnection for the smallest generators.

Nationally, NREL has estimated that there are as many as 15,000 grid interconnections, and to date there have been no major accidents or incidents attributable to improper interconnections — whether by the traditional utility/wholesalers,. or by distributed generation sites, Cook said.

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