Notice

Industrial Hydrogen Accelerator Programme: Stream 1 projects

Updated 13 September 2023

The £26 million Industrial Hydrogen Accelerator Programme provided funding for innovation projects that can demonstrate end-to-end industrial fuel switching to hydrogen.

Stream 1, now closed, provided up to £10 million in grant funding per project to construct end-to-end industrial hydrogen systems, from hydrogen production to end-use, to prove their feasibility and provide further evidence on the real-world performance and costs.

Project name: Smart Hydrogen-Gas Network (SHyGaN) Concept

Lead Organisation: H2GO Power Ltd
BEIS funding: £3,118,627.48

Hydrogen could play a valuable role in enabling net-zero targets, through integration in energy systems, industry and transportation. H2GO Power, a London-based company developing innovative hydrogen-based software and hardware solutions, join forces with Baxi, a market leading manufacturer of heating and hot water solutions, to bring to life an industrial scale demonstration of a unique carbon neutral heating solution (heat-in-a-box). Northern Gas Networks (NGN), being the end-user partner, will host the project at its facilities in Low Thornley, near Gateshead. The Manufacturing Technology Centre (The MTC) will support the design, build, packaging and test of the solution at their Coventry home, part of the High Value Manufacturing Catapult.

This project is aimed at decarbonising an energy intensive process of the network - gas preheating. Gas preheating is a high risk operation as its failure can result in network breakdown that in turn can cause a security breach at national level.

Heat-in-a-box is a containerised first-of-a-kind solution, combining electrolysis, H2GO’s proprietary low-pressure hydrogen storage and Baxi’s hydrogen boiler, the first-ever pure hydrogen boiler for commercial applications. The end-to-end system will be powered by solar PV and supported by an AI-enabled optimisation software platform developed by H2GO Power (HyAI), the world’s first optimisation end-to-end Software as a service platform specifically designed for hydrogen systems.

Through this project, a heat-in-a-box system will supply heat for gas preheating in a safe and carbon-neutral manner, with potential to supply renewable heating for other operations. The system has been designed for a maximised energy efficiency, minimal system maintenance and to secure carbon-free and safe operation. Operations, predictive maintenance, costs and environmental footprint are enhanced by H2GO’s novel and proprietary AI software platform (HyAI). HyAI will be installed on NGN’s existing infrastructure to integrate them as part of the solution and optimise the overall system operation. In this sense the solution introduces the concept of a Smart Hydrogen-Gas Network (SHyGaN). A consortium of H2GO Power, Baxi, NGN, HSSMI and The MTC make up the SHyGaN project. An agreement has been signed with DNV to provide high level assurance of regulatory and safety issues that need to be considered.

Through the demonstration we will prove that heat-in-a-box is highly beneficial for industrial facilities with preheating or other heating processes to reduce their emissions. The industrial applicability of heat-in-a-box is flexible as it can decarbonise heating processes from multiple industries such as the cement, glass, ceramics, chemical, food & drinks, paper & pulp and more. Furthermore, the demand for heat is three times higher than the demand for power and is responsible for 40% of all global emissions. Decarbonisation of heat systems have been proven difficult and costly to achieve so far, but with the introduction of the SHyGaN system we offer a real potential for a wider decarbonisation of heating applications.