Fusion Fuel today (December 7) revealed it had been approved for the grant for its Sines Green Hydrogen Valley Alliance through Component 5 (C-05), Portugal’s Recovery and Resilience Plan.
Of the €36m awarded to the consortium, H2 View understands, €22.5m ($23.5m) will be allocated to Fusion Fuel’s H2 HEVO-SINES project, which looked to install 3,000 of the company’s HEVO-Solar electrolysers, making up 75MW of electrolysis capacity.
The company is acting as technology partner to KEME Energy, Transition2Green, and HyLAB Collaborative Laboratory for the development of the project.
Plans for the project in Sines, Portugal had initially set out to integrate 300 HEVO-Solar units, offering around 6.6MW of green hydrogen production capacity.
Read more: €10m grant for Fusion Fuel’s 6.6MW green hydrogen project in Portugal
Having already secured 121 hectares of land for the project, Fusion Fuel expects to take FID and commence construction of the facility in 2024, seeing green hydrogen produced at the Sines site used to aid the decarbonisation of local industry, mobility applications, and blending into the natural gas grid.
A further €3.5m ($3.6m) will be fund Fusion Fuel’s research and development of its proprietary electrolysis technology. In November (2022), the company announced it was entering the centralised PEM electrolyser market, revealing its HEVO-Chain PEM electrolyser.
Read more: Portugal’s Fusion Fuel announces entry into centralised PEM electrolyser market
The remaining €10m ($10.4m) of C-05 funding will be allocated to other consortium partners.
“This is an important milestone, not only for Fusion Fuel, but for Portugal as well,” said Pedro Caçorino Dias, Head of Commercial for Portugal at Fusion Fuel. “It’s the largest funding allocation to date by the Portuguese government as part of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan, a tangible expression of Portugal’s commitment to the energy transition effort and ambition to be at the forefront of the global green hydrogen economy.”
C-05 is intended to align stakeholders from across the entire value chain to develop the domestic green hydrogen ecosystem.
Frederico Figueira de Chaves, co-head and Chief Financial Officer at Fusion Fuel, added, “We have discussed at length our overarching commercial objective of finding a home for 100% of our production capacity beginning in 2023. The C-05 grants secured by the Sines Green Hydrogen Valley Alliance will give us a substantial head start and position us to deliver on that objective.
“We are thrilled to have received approval for this funding award, a decision that cements our position as a prominent player in the Sines green hydrogen ecosystem and further strengthens our market positioning as we begin to look at markets outside of Southern Europe.”
Fusion Fuel’s decentralised, scalable solar-to-hydrogen solution
Across the hydrogen production industry, there are an increasing number of projects where clean electricity production is being integrated with electrolysis technology. However, there are few solutions on currently on the market that offer quite such a comprehensive solution as Fusion Fuel’s.
Fusion Fuel’s origin story begins with a Portuguese concentrated photovoltaic (CPV) technology firm and an idea to utilise the thermal energy created as a by-product of the solar concentration process to improve electrolyser efficiency. By developing an integrated technology that uses both the electrical energy to power the electrolysis process, and the waste heat to optimise the feed water temperature, Fusion Fuel was able to reduce the energy required to produce green hydrogen.
That technology comes in the form of the HEVO-Solar, which has been described as a miniature proton exchange membrane (PEM) electrolyser with an integrated CPV system, allowing an entire package for off-grid, decentralised green hydrogen production. And the company now leverages the technology advancements with a full solutions-based approach to partnership engagements and green hydrogen deployments.
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