Green Hydrogen's Future in the Sunshine State: Process, Product, and Promise

By Lindsey Ranayhossaini, Staff WriterPhotos courtesy of Duke Energy

In October, Duke Energy Corporation announced its plan to build the nation’s first end-to-end green hydrogen production facility in DeBary, Fla. The facility, designed to test the efficacy of green hydrogen in the power grid, will produce, store and combust green hydrogen for peaking power applications.

“We wanted to combine sources of renewable energy to produce green hydrogen and then use that hydrogen to produce energy,” said Peter Hoeflich, director of generation technology for Duke Energy.

The Process: Duke Energy's Demonstration

The site in DeBary was selected based on its location near Duke Energy’s DeBary Solar Power Plant, which generates 74.5 megawatts of electricity. The company’s green hydrogen demonstration will electrically tap into the solar field and cable the alternating A/C current power to the hydrogen production facility.

The hydrogen will be captured through the process of electrolysis, during which the A/C current from the solar field will be converted back to D/C power in a 1-MW electrolyzer that splits injected water into hydrogen and oxygen.

The oxygen will be vented, and the hydrogen will be removed from the electrolyzer, compressed to 3,600 pounds per square inch (PSI) and stored in 66 high pressure tubes. Once all the tubes are full, the hydrogen will be available for use in the combustion turbines.

“These are peaking combustion turbines,” Hoeflich said. “They don't run continuously. They are utilized when they’re cost-effective to meet peak demand in the system. One combustion turbine out of 10 will have the ability to blend hydrogen from 25% all the way up to 100%.”

The combustion turbines will be upgraded using GE Vernova technology and will be the nation’s first with the capability to run on such a high percentage of hydrogen.

The Product: Green Hydrogen's Benefits

Duke Energy’s demonstration arrives in a climate of increased demand for innovation in the renewable energy space. Spurred by the Biden Administration’s efforts to decarbonize American industry and $9.5 billion in funding for clean hydrogen from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the U.S. Department of Energy launched its Hydrogen Shot in 2021.

The Hydrogen Shot, first in a series of Energy Earthshot initiatives advanced by the Department of Energy, aims to reduce the cost of clean hydrogen by 80% to $1 per kilogram in the next decade. It also seeks to develop the clean hydrogen industry as a next generation industry in distressed communities.

Green hydrogen is viewed as an attractive source of renewable energy because it is clean-burning, dispatchable and can more readily replace fossil fuels than other renewable energy sources. Existing equipment can typically be modified to run using hydrogen instead of natural gas, making hydrogen a versatile energy source that is suitable for a number of industries.

“What I think is unique and particularly interesting about hydrogen is that it can be utilized in a lot of different use cases,” Hoeflich said. “There’s a lot of hydrogen being used for material handling, heavy transport, petrochemical fertilizers, and [Duke Energy’s] interest is in power generation.”

In the case of the DeBary site, green hydrogen is being tested for its contribution to power grid resiliency, which could make a difference during periods of peak demand in Florida’s summer and winter months. As a localized power source, green hydrogen could also prove to be more reliable than natural gas, which cannot be transported to the state during natural disasters like hurricanes.

On a national level, developing an industry around green hydrogen could lead to the creation of new jobs. According to the Department of Energy’s “U.S. National Clean Hydrogen Strategy and Roadmap,” implementing clean hydrogen in the United States could create 100,000 jobs by 2030 and 450,000 cumulative job-years through 2030.

It's Not Easy Being Green

However, green hydrogen does not come without its drawbacks. Barriers to integrating green hydrogen in the U.S. energy infrastructure include high production and infrastructure costs.

Currently, the cost per kilogram of hydrogen ranges from $4.50 to $12, according to BloombergNEF. This stands in contrast to the cost of natural gas. Though the price per metric million British Thermal Units (MMBtu) of natural gas ranges based on a variety of market factors, the U.S. Energy Information Administration reported a cost of $1.52 per MMBtu as of Feb. 27, 2024. And though the U.S. Department of Energy’s initiatives aim to reduce the cost of clean hydrogen, those efforts will take time.

One of the factors in hydrogen’s high cost is storage. Hydrogen can be stored in a variety of forms – as a gas compressed in cylinders or in underground salt caverns, as a liquid at cryogenic temperatures or as a solid, bound with other materials that react with it. Each of these storage methods come with unique challenges and costs.

“Hopefully, there will be some technological advances that improve that storage cost and storage technology,” Hoeflich said.

There are also safety concerns associated with the use of hydrogen. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration states that the hydrogen used in fuel cells “can cause fires and explosions if not handled properly.”

Like natural gas and propane, hydrogen is an odorless gas, making it difficult to detect leaks.

However, unlike natural gas and propane, which have added odorants to assist with leak detection, hydrogen is so light that no known odorants can be added.

“From a technical perspective, [hydrogen] has a wider flammability range,” Hoeflich said. “It's very light, and it doesn't collect like, let's say, oil would if you had an oil leak. The oil remains at the site where hydrogen will want to escape very quickly. [Hydrogen’s] just got unique characteristics that you've got to address from a safety perspective.”

Still, Hoeflich said that the safety concerns around green hydrogen are not entirely different from conventional fuels. All fuels are flammable, and all fuels have safety guidelines and parameters that must be followed. “Hydrogen has been used for many, many years in the petrochemical industry,” Hoeflich said. “NASA has used hydrogen for a lot of the space program work. What’s been done over a long period of time is that there’s been a very good development of safety standards, design parameters and operating procedures that need to be followed.”

The Promise: Energizing the Future

Construction is underway at Duke Energy’s Debary Site, and the company projects that the facility will produce its first hydrogen by the end of 2024. As a demonstration, the hydrogen production facility is designed as a learning opportunity for Duke Energy to determine how to most effectively integrate green hydrogen into its power grid.

“It's not a full scale hydrogen production facility – it’s a two-megawatt electrolyzer,” Hoeflich said. “We’re meant to learn from this. We’re working through hazardous operations assessments, determining our vending and purging procedures, and making sure we know how to safely produce and handle hydrogen.”

Hoeflich said Duke Energy also plans to use the demonstration as an opportunity to learn how to smooth solar field energy output and test different blends of natural gas and hydrogen in its upgraded combustion turbines.

“It’s a really exciting project, and ideally, it’s going to make a difference in terms of what we understand about producing and using hydrogen,” Hoeflich said.