Cost-efficient and reliable designs towards gigawatt-scale electrolytic hydrogen production plants

Expected Outcome:As Europe strives towards its objective of climate neutrality, renewable hydrogen at industrial scale is pivotal for decarbonising energy-intensive sectors. Large-scale water electrolysis is central to this transition, yet Europe faces significant challenges in building gigawatt-scale hydrogen production plants that are reliable enough to ensure consistent operation and financially sustainable to attract unsubsidised investment. Current projects struggle with costly and fragmented system integration, limited scalability from electrolyser providers and unoptimised Balance-of-Plant (BoP) systems, resulting in high electrolytic hydrogen costs. In particular:Expectations on CAPEX reduction have not been met, recent reports from BNEF[1], IEA[2] and TNO[3] indicate actual hydrogen plant cost of 2160-3050 $/kW, far from SRIA objectives.The way to develop large scale projects (>400MW) or a small scale 20 MW projects is very similar and based on the same identical electrolyser bricks thus limiting economies of scale.Restricted freedom to adapt or optimise OEM designs depending on the project.If the standardised approach has been chosen on most of small-scale projects, there is no or few alternatives available for large scale projects.What is optimum for OEMs limit of scope is not always the optimum at the hydrogen plant level. Aside from these hurdles, the BoP of a hydrogen plant can be built with components (pumps, exchangers, separators, piping, instruments, compression, purification, storage etc.) that already have a high level of maturity inherited from similar industries (oil & gas, water, etc.), apart from stacks for which iterative improvements are still expected.Thus, it is possible to overcome some of the current limitations by relying on mature components while exploring innovative new plant architectures (electrical, process), new construction philosophies, new integrations between parts of the plant, etc., pushing the mature components to