Octopus Hydrogen has formed a strategic partnership with Innova Renewables and Novus to roll out green hydrogen production across the UK.
Together they will design, build and operate hydrogen production at several of Innova’s renewable generation sites across the country. This will include the installation of electrolysers, compression and mobile hydrogen storage.
Innova Renewables and Novus have over 4GW of renewable projects under development in the UK already, which will be used for the project while the electrolysers will typically be between 2MW and 20MW in scale.
The green hydrogen production facilities will be directly connected to the on-site renewable generation via long-term power purchase agreements, to create some of the first co-located green hydrogen projects in the UK.
They will create between 500kg and 2,500kg of hydrogen a day, with Octopus Hydrogen to combine the full value chain from production, optimisation and delivery to end-users in the transport sector, including over 500 long haul HGVs.
Will Rowe, founder and CEO of Octopus Hydrogen said the partnerships were an “incredibly exciting step forward” allowing them to “develop and establish our decentralised model for green hydrogen production in the UK”.
“We need to see electrification wherever possible, for home heating and domestic cars, but we also need green hydrogen to help decarbonise the hard-to-abate parts of the transport sector.”
Octopus Hydrogen’s optimisation software will be used to control the electrolysis to ensure the site exports at full potential. This will allow the companies to help balance the grid, by choosing the best times to use the green electricity to produce hydrogen.
The hydrogen arm of the Octopus Energy Group was announced in April, following the group acquiring Octopus Renewables. This brought a portfolio of more than 300 clean energy assets with a combined capacity of 2,800MW across six countries together with the company’s supply business which currently serves two million domestic customers.
The potential for hydrogen in the UK is gaining increasing focus as the country looks for solutions for hard to decarbonise sectors, like HGVs. In August, the government released its plans to achieve 5GW of low carbon hydrogen production capacity by 2030.
There is still concern that the cost needs to fall to make green hydrogen a viable solution however, with Aurora Energy Research finding that electrolyser projects will need to achieve significant cost reductions in order to compete with blue hydrogen on economic terms.