How to use hydrogen technology to provide green energy to remote areas

A team of EU-funded project developers has deployed a hydrogen energy storage system in the remote village of Agkistro in northern Greece.

There are still many islands and remote areas in the world that don't have access to the grid. Lacking reliable and cheap electricity, they rely on diesel generators or local renewable energy sources like sunlight and wind. While solar and wind are more environmentally friendly alternatives, they are intermittent and supply often fails to meet demand. A promising solution to this problem is large-scale energy storage, and hydrogen has great advantages in this regard.

Not only can hydrogen be produced from renewable energy sources, but unlike electricity, it can also be stored for long periods of time on a large scale. In order to demonstrate the feasibility of hydrogen energy storage in isolated microgrid areas, the EU-funded "REMOTE" project has installed such a system in Agkistro, a small village in the Serres region. The equipment consists of a hydrogen power-to-power system. The system includes an electrolyzer that converts electrical energy into hydrogen (power-to-gas) and a fuel cell system that converts large amounts of stored hydrogen into electrical energy (gas-to-power).

Powering agricultural food processing equipment

This hydrogen energy storage system will provide power to local agricultural food processing units.

A Greek renewable energy company will use some of the energy from a nearby hydroelectric plant it owns to produce hydrogen. The hydrogen will be stored and used to generate electricity when needed.

“ENGIE EPS has been a pioneer in hydrogen since 2005 and at the forefront of battery storage and microgrids since 2012,” Carloberto Guglielminotti, CEO of ENGIE EPS, said in a press release on the company’s website.

“With the completion of the Agkistro plant, our patented hydrogen technology is now proven on 4 continents and is the only viable option to make microgrids 100% green.”

“In the future, we are also targeting large-scale application opportunities as a system integrator and technology supplier, leveraging our patented technology platform and unparalleled hydrogen and energy storage experience to build our industrial solutions product line.”

Agkistro is one of four demonstration sites selected for the REMOTE project. The other three are the Fløn Islands in Norway (another isolated microgrid application), and the remote villages of Ginostra and Ambornetti, far from the grid, in southern and northern Italy. The four sites test different combinations of renewable energy sources in different climates in southern Europe and Scandinavia. The goal is to completely replace fossil fuels at all sites. At the 2020 European Sustainable Energy Week awards ceremony held earlier this year, the REMOTE (Remote Area Energy Supply Based on Integrated Hydrogen Technology with Multiple Options) project was awarded the Best Renewable Energy Project in the Innovation category. The four-year experimental project will end in December 2021.

For more information, please refer to: REMOTE project official website

(Original source: REMOTE project Global Hydrogen Energy Network, New Energy Network Comprehensive)