Tech

Prohibitively high production costs have historically made green hydrogen commercially unviable. In order to solve this challenge, the Fusion Fuel research team broke with convention and took a fundamentally different approach than the rest of the industry. Rather than focusing on ever larger electrolyzers, they developed the concept of a miniaturized and decentralized design, which required completely rethinking the form factor, materials used, and production methodology.

Between 2018 to 2020 the team developed, tested, and submitted patents for, its radically different solution that opens the door to green hydrogen that can be cost-competitive with grey hydrogen by 2023.

HEVO is Fusion Fuel's proprietary miniaturized PEM electrolyzer.

It has been designed to be small, lightweight and, critically, able to be mass produced. Its simplicity is the key to its versatility. FUSION-FUEL's HEVO’s are combined with a high-efficiency solar cell and attached to a specially designed concentrated photovoltaic (CPV) solar panel to leverage 100% of the sun’s energy—both electrical and thermal—to deliver highly competitive green hydrogen.

The CPV cell converts more than 40% of solar energy it captures into electricity, while the remaining 60% given off as thermal energy. By attaching HEVO directly to the CPV solution, HEVO can utilize the electrical energy, without transport or conversion losses, to power the electrochemical reaction, while also using the thermal energy to pre-heat the feed water and reduce the energy load required to split the water molecule.

The CPV system concentrates solar radiation 1,400x onto a triple junction solar cell, allowing for very high solar-to-electric conversion while also generating the heat that improves the efficiency of our electrolyzer. Each HEVO-Solar unit has a surface area of around 100m2 and weighs approximately 4 tons.

In a location with 2,100 KWh/m2/year of solar irradiance—the average annual DNI in southern Portugal—each HEVO-Solar can produce 1 ton of hydrogen per year. The HEVO-Solar is also designed to utilize renewable energy from the grid or other sources to operate overnight or when the sun isn’t shining, which would double the annual output of each unit.