The plans were first revealed to H2 View in June by Dr. Rachel Smith, Executive Director of ITM Power, who confirmed the company had “already raised sufficient funds to build a second factory” which “would be even bigger than the current one”.
ITM Power moved into the world’s largest electrolyser manufacturing facility in Sheffield, UK in January 2021.
Read more: ITM Power highlights ‘transformational’ year in FY21 results
With a capacity to produce 1GW of electrolysis a year, ITM Power said the Gigafactory provides a blueprint which can be easily replicated when there are large order volumes.
Speaking exclusively with H2 View this morning, Dr. Graham Cooley, Director of ITM Power, shed further light on these plans.
“We raised £250m ($343m) on the London stock market to build a second gigafactory that will have a capacity of 1.5GW, taking us to 2.5GW of capacity in the UK. The second factory is separate to the first one that we moved into in January,” Cooley told H2 View.
“We’re going to be building a more automated production line, testing that more automated production line, and then we’ll have the additional 1.5GW of capacity in the UK, which will come online in 2023.
“Once we’ve done all of that, we’re going to be looking at doing a commercial deal to build a 2.5GW factory to be opened in 2024, which will be outside of the UK.”
What does this mean for the UK hydrogen Industry? Cooley believes it will help supply the increasing demand for hydrogen, “It means that there is a manufacturer in the UK that can respond to the growing level of demand. We are scaling the manufacturing of the electrolyser modules and our partner Linde Engineering is scaling the deployment case.”
This growing demand for hydrogen is represented with the facts and figures at ITM Power, with Cooley explaining to H2 View, “Our backlog is at 310MW. Our tender pipeline, that’s the number of quotations we’ve made against commercial tenders, just went over 1GW for the first time.”
From small steps to giant leaps and always staying ahead of the game: The story of ITM Power
When it comes to electrolysers, there’s one company which is never far from the headlines: ITM Power. Thanks to its focus on three broad markets areas – mobility, Power-to-X and industry, the British manufacturer of polymer electrolyte membrane electrolysers has grown considerably in recent years and moved into the world’s largest electrolyser manufacturing facility in Sheffield, UK in January 2021.
Through standardisation, modularisation and the employment of world class practices, ITM Power has the manufacturing capacity to produce 1GW of electrolysis a year. The company says the Gigafactory provides a blueprint which can be easily replicated when there are large order volumes. And ITM Power confirmed to H2 View there are already fully funded plans in the pipeline to build a second gigawatt-scale facility which would be even bigger than the current one.
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