A European utility just put real capital into hydrogen power at grid scale. The real question is whether it can ever get cheap enough to expand beyond a single site.
Hi, I'm Steve Hill, CEO of NewHydrogen, with this week's top hydrogen news. Before we dive in, here's a quick reminder of what we're building at NewHydrogen. Our ThermoLoop® technology is being designed to produce the world's cheapest clean hydrogen using heat and water instead of expensive electricity.
We're moving that work forward with new patents and new engineering milestones. You can subscribe to our newsletter if you'd like to follow our progress.
First up, BCC Research projects the hydrogen fuel cell market will more than double to $13.1 billion by 2031, pointing straight at AI data centers as the catalyst. These facilities need huge amounts of power right now, much faster than the grid can deliver. Fuel cells can be deployed on-site immediately, which would create massive demand for low-cost clean hydrogen.
This is exactly where ThermoLoop® technology can come in. ThermoLoop® is being designed to pair with small modular nuclear reactors, which governments are fast-tracking all around the globe, to produce cheap, clean hydrogen at any scale. Head to newhydrogen.com for more information.
Next, Intelligent Energy is making the case for hydrogen fuel cells over batteries in drone parcel delivery. Battery-powered delivery drones work fine for short hops, but batteries are heavy and they need to land and recharge often. Swapping in a hydrogen fuel cell gives a drone a lot more range and endurance without the extra weight, meaning one delivery hub can cover a lot more ground, especially useful for rural routes or trips over water. Refueling is quick, too, so drones spend more time flying and less time charging.
Hydrogen and drones has become a hot application, but this is the first time we've ever seen it in parcel delivery.
Here's our last story for today. Kawasaki Heavy Industries just finished installing a 30-megawatt hydrogen-only gas turbine at a power plant in Germany, working with German utility RWE. It runs on 100% hydrogen, the first demonstration of its kind in Europe of this size. For reference, 30 megawatts should power about 25,000 homes.
Hydrogen for this plant comes from electrolyzers running on wind power, splitting water apart using electricity. And that's the expensive way to make hydrogen—the same bottleneck we talk about every single week. It's the right intention on the demand side, but the supply side still runs on inefficient electricity. And in this case, electricity generated by wind, which has an average capacity factor of only around 35%.
Data centers hungry for power. Drones stretching their range. A power plant determined to prove that hydrogen works at grid scale. These are exactly the types of applications ThermoLoop® is being built to unlock by making the clean hydrogen behind them competitively cheap.
Head over to newhydrogen.com to watch a short explainer video on how ThermoLoop® works, how it's different, and why it matters.
NewHydrogen is a publicly traded company. We trade under the symbol NEWH. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you again next week.