The PEM electrolyser making operation opened in November 2023 with one-third of its nameplate 3GW capacity, with plans to scale up by 2026.

Air Liquide’s Vice-President of Innovation, Electronics and Hydrogen, Armelle Levieux, revealed on LinkedIn, the site had passed 1GW of order intake this week.

“The stacks coming out of this factory are already making major projects a reality,” she said.

The milestone comes after Siemens Energy delivered the first nine of 12 stacks to Air Liquide’s 200MW Normand’Hy project. The joint venture is also lined up to supply technology for Air Liquide’s 450MW worth of Dutch projects to supply Total Energies.

On Monday (29 September), the German tech OEM was selected to supply 140MW of electrolysers to the Austrian state-owned OMV’s green hydrogen plant for refining.

However, it comes amid calls on policymakers to relax rules to enable more electrolyser deployment.

On Wednesday (1 October), Siemens Energy was among the electrolyser OEMs calling on the European Commission to deliver more pragmatic and flexible RFNBO rules.

The group argued the current criteria – additionality, hourly matching and geographical correlation – were stalling projects.

Currently, the European market has a vast electrolyser making overcapacity. According to Hydrogen Europe, the continent hosts around 12GW of capacity per year. But projections expect less than 5GW of deployment through to 2030.

Siemens Energy’s Senior Vice-President for Sustainable Energy Systems, Alexey Ustinov, previously told H2 View the capacity was a “response” to policymaker-set targets of producing 10 million tonnes of green hydrogen per year by 2030.