In this Solar Conversation, Alex Comeau , Enterprise Account Manager at Dynapower , talks with Kerim Baran of Solar Academy. In this conversation the duo discuss various subjects from production of Hydrogen molecules to the usage of Hydrogen Fuel Cell solutions coupled with Solar. Be sure to tune into the full podcast here , or read the transcript below:
Introduction
Kerim: Hi, everyone! This is Kerim, Kerim Baran with Solar Academy. Today, I’m here with Alex Comeau, Enterprise Account Manager at Dynapower, and we are going to talk about hydrogen energy, hydrogen fuel cell solutions, and how hydrogen or DC-coupled solar solutions work around hydrogen.
Alex Comeau’s Journey to Dynapower
And before we get into that topic, Alex, I would like to ask you a little bit about your background, how you ended up at Dynapower or in this field. Go as far back as you like, middle school, high school, college, early career. Give us a little insight into your background, and how you ended up in this really intriguing position at Dynapower.
Alex: I’d be happy to, and thank you for the opportunity. Just going back a few years, I was working in a project management role at a nonprofit and had an opportunity to go to grad school for public administration. I thought I was going to be serving a greater purpose, working for the government, and really doing some direct kind of work there.
Along the way I got into finance and budgeting and really saw a big opportunity in the renewable energy, clean energy industry. I said, “That’s really fascinating. I don’t understand electricity at all, but there’s been solar panels everywhere, and it’s a really exciting place to be.”
I moved back to an area I grew up in upstate New York and Vermont. There’s a company I now work for, Dynapower. You can see it behind me. We’ve got about 200 employees, and we’ve been in the area for 30 years. The company’s been around for about 60 and so it was a company that I had some personal connections to and an opportunity came up where they needed some support on the sales side. It’s been a really great fit ever since.
Dynapower’s History and Evolution
Kerim: Nice. You said the company has been around for 30, 60 years. I remember from our previous solar conversation that we did with Dynapower that the company is part of Sensata Technologies or they merged a while ago.
Alex: That’s right.
Kerim: The parent company has 6,000 or so employees, if I remember it correctly.
Alex: That’s right.
Kerim: Dynapower is the power conversion experts division within Sensata. Is that the right way to explain that?
Alex: Exactly. We started as a company supporting the automobile industry, doing rectifiers for chrome plating. You’ve got to get that bumper plated, and we’re going to provide the power supply for that bath to do the chrome plating.
The company was formed in Michigan, and then, about 30 years ago, we moved to Vermont again, where I live. We’ve been doing power conversion ever since. That’s this, that’s the 60-year history, and about two years ago we joined with Sensata. They purchased our company, and we’re the front of the show for them for electrification at a really large utility scale.
Kerim: Got it.
Understanding Hydrogen and Its Market
Today, we’re going to talk about Dynapower’s power conversion solutions around hydrogen. I recently learned – my background is more in solar. I did not really know much about hydrogen and how that relates to energy, but there are essentially two different markets around hydrogen. They’re the same process backwards. Is that a good way to explain it? Or perhaps you can explain it better than me.
Alex: I can elaborate on that a little bit. Maybe as a touch point, I think solar is a great place to start. Making power conversion systems, we’ve been doing rectifiers for 60 years.
About 20 years ago, we started taking that experience and knowledge and applying it into battery energy storage systems and saying, “Okay, we can do the bidirectional inverter, the rectification and the inversion AC to DC and back for battery energy storage applications. So that kind of –
Kerim: This is at utility scale, I assume. Right?
Alex: That’s correct.
Kerim: Because we’re just giving bidirectional stuff at homes just about now.
Alex: We’re all at 3-phase power hundreds of kilowatts to megawatts scale. Definitely you know that commercial and industrial background of our company. That was the market we wanted to focus on.
That’s where we overlap with solar a little bit was the battery energy storage, and obviously, we know how that has really boomed in the stationary storage world.
Hydrogen Production and Applications
When it comes to hydrogen, we take that same technology basis, the power conversion system. There are two different applications. We see it on both ends of the hydrogen value chain. There’s hydrogen production, which for us just means making green or renewable hydrogen with little to no carbon footprint through the process of electrolysis and skipping a whole bunch of electrochemistry. Suffice to say that we need very large power rectification, generally, converting AC currents up to 50,000 amp units and higher. It’s a really massive power electronics to produce hydrogen, clean hydrogen, and then on the other end of that market there’s the demand side. The demand for hydrogen, you can use it in applications where you’re taking the hydrogen molecules, and you’re essentially converting back to electricity. In that way you can take –
Kerim: You do that with the fuel cells.
Alex: Exactly.
Kerim: You feed them through the fuel cells.
Alex: We play on both ends of that spectrum. We’ll talk about that a little bit.
Kerim: Got it. The part that is more relevant to the world of solar and battery and renewable energy in that sense is probably the part that is, as most people know, in solar production, especially during midday hours, there’s a ton of extra lost electrons, in a way, because you’re producing so much and you’re over that on top of the bell curve.
Alex: You’re curtailing whatever is beyond your inverter capacity and your interconnection. Exactly.
Kerim: That’s essentially free energy not being used anywhere and one of those uses, and I’ve heard many creative uses of that from Bitcoin mining to many other things. One of that is to take that extra energy and use that in that electrolysis process to generate the hydrogen molecules, which then can be used almost like a battery.
Alex: Certainly. And then there’s a whole set of market conditions where hydrogen is needed. Right? It can be used in fuel cells, as we mentioned, or directly in industrial processes, but there may be customers who are willing to pay for hydrogen that’s generated from solar electricity to your point, knowing that it’s a renewable resource.
There may be a green premium that you can capture selling that hydrogen to certain customers.
Kerim: If you want, you can take that same exact hydrogen you just produced and feed it through a fuel cell and then generate electrons again.
Depending on the context and location and pricing of these different inputs and outputs, you can make many different use cases.
Challenges and Opportunities in Hydrogen
With that as the background, where do you guys see yourselves being really active right now in the hydrogen market?
Alex: Certainly. Thanks for asking. Like everything it’s rapidly changing, and it’s a pretty exciting place to be. There’s a lot of technology improvement every year.
As I mentioned, we have a background in industrial scale rectification. For us, our primary focus is really on the massive utility scale electrolysis sites where we’re talking hundreds of megawatts of hydrogen electrolysis.
In those applications, we’ve got a really large containerized solution. Like I said before, we can get up to 50,000-60,000 amps in a single unit, and generally, depending on the application, the voltages can vary, but we’ll say, 300-500 volts DC.
We’re selling multiples of those units into these really massive sites, and a lot of these sites have their own power purchase agreements with solar arrays, or they’ll be installing solar and wind at the same time as the electrolysis site. It’s what I would really describe as a utility scale hydrogen production market.
Kerim: Got it. Are you able to talk about who are some of your customers that use this?
Alex: Absolutely. We work with a number of the leading electrolyzer manufacturers. At this point, the technology is changing so rapidly that the scope of the project changes from each project. But generally speaking, there’s a number of leading technology companies. One of our biggest projects is the ACES project in Delta, Utah. That’s a 220- megawatt hydrogen production site.
That particular project is using HydrogenPro electrolyzers, and we did provide the full medium voltage rectification power supply for those. That’s 220 megawatts of power supply. That project is being commissioned, as we speak, and it really will be the biggest hydrogen production plant via electrolysis in North America when that goes online. It’s really a test case for a lot of the industry, and how to get to this massive scale.
Kerim: And this production facility is located next to a large solar farm in that case.
Alex: It’s being fed by a solar farm, and actually, the really interesting thing, Kerim, is they’re above a salt cavern. What they’re doing is they’re producing hydrogen, and they’re pumping it into the ground, and they’re storing it below ground in these salt caverns, much like they do with methane or natural gas, in other parts of the Gulf Coast.
They’re really taking the hydrogen, they’re taking the solar production in the summer in Utah, right, a sunny state, last time I was there, and storing it in the form of a molecule underground for interseasonal battery, essentially, taking excess solar energy and storing it for use in the fall and winter really to support the Greater California and the Southern California grid.
Kerim: Wow, and then that hydrogen that’s stored is taken out and used later, for what purposes and where?
Alex: Well, they are distributing it. They have some off-takers, let’s say, steel mills, who maybe need hydrogen for their processes, but I think the primary use for that hydrogen is to be burned in a turbine and produce electricity.
Kerim: Like a natural gas turbine. Let’s also talk about this process of how you’re taking in, you’re feeding electricity, excess electricity from midday hours of a powerful solar plant, utility scale solar plant.
How does that process work at the end, like you take water and split it, and you get the H20 split and then coupled with the electrons? Then you get the hydrogen and then oxygen, I guess, right? Is that kind of –
Alex: If you want to think about it, it’s like a battery, right? There’s an arrangement of cells within the electrolyzer and the inputs are, as you said, water and electricity. You take water, you put it into the input side of this battery, we’ll call it, and you zap the water with electricity, just to keep it really simple. We’re zapping things, and as you said, it passes through a membrane. There’s an anode and a cathode, and the hydrogen atoms are split off of the oxygen atom in the molecule, and we get hydrogen on the other side.
That’s usually a very pure form of hydrogen that may need a little bit more refinement or pressurization, depending on the specific electrolyzer and the specs for that system. But generally, these systems are producing a high quality, pure hydrogen that can be used for applications like fuel cell cars. Like the Mirai, you could drive away with one of those.
That’s a little bit of the electrochemical process in making the hydrogen, and then just to turn the coin, if you want to take that same system, essentially run it in the other direction, you have the fuel cell application where you put the hydrogen into the fuel cell, and then it actually is able to produce water as a byproduct and electricity, in going through this process in the other direction.
Kerim: Got it. In the original process, we were talking about when you take in the water, do you have to be next to a lake, or a river or an ocean? Or can you just take the humidity in the air, and just take it off of the air?
Alex: Well, unfortunately, you need very pure water. Much like our focus is on electricity, right? There needs to be a high level of control for the electricity.
Some of the things we talk about often are really varying the voltages and the current requirements for the stacks depending on the available electricity, depending on how they want to run the system. Also, what the footprint of that interconnection is with the utility. In our base case, the large site we mentioned earlier, the ACES site, is connected to the local grid.
There’s a lot of concern from the utility about what the impact of running 220 megawatts is. We have to maintain the system and ensure that our footprint on the grid is appropriate and minimal, acceptable to the operator, while at the same time providing a high quality electricity output. In that way you need high quality water as well, but I think there, really, that the blue sky opportunities here with hydrogen are that we can produce hydrogen with, again, a low or no-cost – carbon cost, in many places where they may not have great resources like natural gas available.
It can be very geographically-dependent. We want a lot of solar or wind to provide the electrons for the process. But then you can create this molecule, which has some other uses that unlock some opportunities that aren’t necessarily available with just straight electrification or batteries.
Kerim: Where do you get the pure water from? Like in Utah, I guess it’s from the lake or from underwater.
Alex: A lot of times there are agreements with local water treatment facilities or towns and cities that have water treatment plants. There’s usually water purification processes on site to take high quality water and convert it into extremely pure water.
Again, because we’re putting it into this electrochemical process, any impurities add to degradation and system inefficiencies. You really do need pure water, and that can be a sticking point in the industry.
Market Dynamics and Differentiation
Kerim: Got it. Okay, if we were to talk a little bit about the market dynamics, how does Dynapower differentiate itself vis-a-vis its competitors. And what kind of specific applications are you guys more focused on? Where do you find yourself highly differentiated?
Alex: Thank you. Well, we’ve got a few, really important value adds that we bring to some of our projects. We have a range of rectification technologies that I won’t get into because that’s not what we’re here to talk about. But we’ve been doing thyristor rectifiers for the full 60 years of our company history, and we have newer IGBT-based conversion technologies that you’re going to see in the solar industry.
There’s a lot of comfort in the solar industry because it’s always been a new and nascent industry for the last 10 years, 15 years, or longer, that we’ve been in the industry. But for these electrochemical processes, these large scale plants they have some very — I’ll call them conservative customers and owners who are our traditional large companies, the Dow Joneses of the world, who have a technology aversion where they want to know that it’s a proven technology with a long history, and you’re a company who can provide a solution and stand by it.
Our 60-year lifetime has given us the ability to say, “Look, we’ve got thousands and thousands of applications and projects across the world that are still running. We still support them, and no matter where they are, we’re able to provide the right solution for the needs.
Kerim: Got it. As you are creating the hydrogen molecules out of this process, we talked about one case of using it as a battery, or almost like a battery for storing power purposes.
But there must be other uses of this hydrogen as well in the market. Can you tell us a little bit about where hydrogen is being used? What kinds of other new innovative solutions are being developed around this new technology?
Alex: In some ways, you could think of hydrogen as being the other side of the bridge, when we talk about bridge fuels. If we want to say, natural gas is a bridge fuel, hydrogen is on the far end. What that means to me is that it’s a way to decarbonize some of those sectors and industries that have a really hard time, simply electrifying in the way that you can do it by a car outside that’s an EV. A good example —
Kerim: Like an airplane.
Alex: Exactly. Sustainable aviation fuels, many of them are expected to be and they’re in R&D, expected to be using hydrogen and clean hydrogen in this case as a really important feedstock.
Additionally, ammonia or fertilizers. One way to decarbonize fertilizers, which are incredibly important worldwide, is to use clean hydrogen from an application like hydrogen electrolysis which we’ve been describing.
Kerim: Got it. We also have talked a little bit about clean hydrogen versus gray hydrogen. Can you describe the difference?
Alex: Sure. There’s a few different ways to make hydrogen. SMR (Steam Methane Reforming) and there’s hydrogen pyrolysis. There are many different options, and some of those produce a large carbon footprint. Several companies are out there doing carbon capture with those processes.
There’s a whole veritable rainbow of hydrogen colors. You can go look it up, and they’ll tell you this means it’s hydrogen produced from nuclear. This is hydrogen from solar and wind. This is hydrogen that’s being produced as a byproduct of this other process.
In that way, there’s a lot of options for existing industries, and hydrogen electrolysis that we’ve been discussing is really about 1% of the total market share of hydrogen at the time being, and I’ll let you in on a secret that’s pretty well-known. It’s four times or more expensive than some of the other technologies I just mentioned. We have a real need to lower our costs.
And in one case, that’s why we’re going to these really large plant sizes because we’re able to scale our product and our outputs and lower our individual costs, while the technology readiness improves.
Kerim: You said something interesting there. First of all, going back to the clean and the gray, it’s all about the input, not the output. The output is always –
Alex: It’s always hydrogen.
Kerim: You can make hydrogen even from a coal power plant, powered electricity.
Alex: Certainly.
Kerim: Is that done anywhere in the world? I’m just curious.
Alex: I don’t know that it would be directly, but absolutely, there is hydrogen that’s being produced from, let’s say, just grid power where grid power is provided by a coal plant. There’s no doubt in my mind.
Kerim: Do you think that that is happening somewhere?
Alex: Absolutely.
Kerim: Probably because there’s some other use of hydrogen nearby somewhere, or in that market where it just makes economic sense.
Alex: In that case, we would be talking about a smaller system. Perhaps you have a stainless steel plant, and you need hydrogen for your processes to produce the stainless steel. You may have your own small hydrogen plant that can produce just enough hydrogen for your process. And in order to make that via electrolysis, you’re just using your grid interconnection because you’ve got so many megawatts for your plant already. In that case, you’ll just be producing your own supply and then creating the demand there.
Kerim: Well, thank you for this Intro 101 to hydrogen and also how Dynapower is developing solutions around that. As we come to the end of our conversation, any last thoughts or comments that you would like to share with the audience?
Innovative Projects and Future Outlook
Alex: Well, I do have one other project I really wanted to talk about here, which is a project in India, with Jindal Steel, and that it’s a really exciting project because it uses our utility scale DC to DC converters. They have their own PV power plant, an array, which they’ve then piped directly into their electrolysis stacks.
They’ve taken the DC supply and rather than converting it to AC and going through the normal inversion and back, they’re going directly DC powered into their plant, and they also have DC/DC converters on a battery energy storage system, all connected on the same DC rail to just support ramping conditions and give the system a little bit more robustness and add to the capacity factor for the whole plant. But that’s a really exciting project, because as a company, we see our DC to DC converters as really a game changer for hydrogen, and a way to simply install a hydrogen production system on an existing array somewhere that is curtailing power, where they have free electricity.
We can simply tie in, and we don’t have to work through some of the large interconnection queues and all the challenges that the industry sees it with typical solar arrays.
Kerim: You mentioned this project is in India, but you can replicate this anywhere else, too.
Alex: Absolutely.
Kerim: Is this just, why is that happening in India, but not here in the US?
Alex: That’s a great question. I think in some cases, it’s a pilot. And again, that stainless steel plant they have the off-take need. They have their own demand. They were able to take a 20-year purchase agreement and really agree to the cost of the hydrogen upfront. And so the economics of the project made sense for them in India.
Right now, as that plant gets up to speed and we see more replications of that, we’re going to have an easier time making the economic base case to produce that kind of situation somewhere else.
Kerim: Got it. Alex Comeau, of Dynapower, thank you very much for sharing all this wisdom and knowledge around the hydrogen and DC to DC conversion technologies of Dynapower.
Alex: Thanks, Kerim. It’s really an honor, and I really appreciate what you’re doing. Thank you.
Leave a Reply