POWER September 2020 - 30

TOP PLANT
WindGas Falkenhagen:
Pioneering 'Green' Gas
Production
Courtesy: Uniper
Uniper's Falkenhagen site in Germany hosted two major pilots to produce
" green " hydrogen and methane from wind power, opening up prospects for
lucrative new revenue streams from decarbonized assets that could be applied
to a variety of sectors, including power, heat, manufacturing, transportation,
and storage.
Sonal Patel
I
n 2011, months after Germany's government
adopted a comprehensive
legislative package laying the groundwork
for Energiewende, a transition to a
nuclear-free, renewables-heavy energy
future by 2050, giant utility E.ON was
grappling with a difficult business environment
characterized by weak energy
demand and steep losses from its gas
wholesale business. The company had
already embarked on a strategic reset to
focus on its European businesses and
bank heavily on a wind capacity buildout,
even though it had already begun
to struggle with an overabundance of
intermittent power.
To address these issues, E.ON reconfigured
its organizational setup and
added two technology areas to its activities-energy
storage and smart
homes-identifying both as disruptive
technologies with significant potential
for changing the competitive landscape
and forcing business model innovation.
One concept that emerged as a result
of pooling its international expertise for
all storage technologies was an effort to
set up its first power-to-gas (PtG) pilot
project at Falkenhagen in northeastern
Germany. As the company reasoned at
the time, " Storage facilities, also known
as thermal energy or gas storage facilities
are elements designed to postpone
the use of energy while networks are
systems used to transport energy and to
achieve the balance between surplus energy
and the amounts of energy required
30
when they're actually needed. " PtG, essentially,
" is the art of uniting these two
systems, " it said.
Following a pre-planning phase in
which E.ON explored several potential
sites, the company settled on Falkenhagen
as the most ideal site, owing to
" huge grid bottlenecks " stemming from
wind energy surpluses in the region. The
objective, though revolutionary at the
time, was straightforward: The Falkenhagen
storage plant would produce up to
360 normal cubic meters per hour of hydrogen
from about 2 MW of wind power
through electrolysis. The hydrogen
would be fed into the natural gas pipeline
at about 2% by volume, at a maximum
operating pressure of 55 bar (about 800
psi), effectively storing and transporting
the renewable energy.
After securing a partnership with
Zurich-based gas distributor Swissgas
(Swissgas held 20% of the project),
E.ON moved quickly in October 2011 to
bring the project to fruition. Pivotal to a
quick turnaround was a turnkey contract
with Ontario-based hydrogen generation
and fuel cell product manufacturer
Hydrogenics for the supply, installation,
connection, and commissioning of the
novel PtG plant. The contract covered the
hydrogen production facility-including a
2-MW containerized alkaline electrolyzer,
as well as gas compression, master controls,
and a five-year service and maintenance
agreement, Hydrogenics noted.
The innovative WindGas Falkenhagen
project ultimately successfully fed hydrowww.powermag.com
gen
sourced from 1 MW of wind power
into the local ONTRAS gas grid on Aug.
28, 2013-a timeframe that spanned
less than 10 months from laying the
foundation stone to operation, as one official
noted at the time. The PtG project
was pivotal to establishing a standardization
of E.ON's new WindGas product
process chain, including to procure new
suppliers. One example was Hartmann
Valves, which provided the 24 true metalto-metal
sealing ball valves designed to
meet the excessive demands for service
associated with pure hydrogen while ensuring
maximum safety, because " Pure
hydrogen is a challenging fluid, " as Dr.
Helge Föcker, project manager of Storage
Facilities & Project Management for Uniper
Energy Storage GmbH, noted. But as
significantly, the PtG project also helped
optimize the operational concept-to essentially
balance fluctuating power from
wind with the changing needs of the gas
feed-and it furnished the company with
crucial insight into technology, costs, and
permitting for the novel undertaking.
Expanding Methanation
The PtG project unfolded so smoothly
that E.ON moved forward in April 2013
with a second WindGas project in nearby
Hamburg using a Hydrogenics 1.5-MW
polymer electrolyte membrane (PEM)
electrolyzer stack. That project went online
in October 2015, just months after
E.ON, whose conventional generation
fleet continued to weigh on profits, embarked
on a major split to separate its
POWER | September 2020
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POWER September 2020

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