University of Florida and Synhelion To Scale Up Solar Hydrogen Energy Solution
Synhelion and its partner, University of Florida, announced today that their joint project has been awarded $2.7 million from the U.S. Department of Energy Solar Energy Technologies Office (SETO). The project aims to accelerate the large-scale development and deployment of concentrating solar thermal power (CSP) technology to produce green hydrogen for industrial decarbonization and electric power generation and storage.
Green hydrogen is an important energy vector for the transition to a renewable energy infrastructure. But today, most of the world’s hydrogen is produced from natural gas, a process that, while cheap, does not address the energy and climate concerns of the United States and the world.
The project aims to enable large-scale production of green hydrogen from solar energy by leveraging concentrating solar power (CSP) infrastructure and solar heat to split water (H2O) into hydrogen (H2) and oxygen (O2). Synhelion’s breakthrough technology delivers high-temperature solar process heat beyond 1’500°C, enabling the decarbonization of industrial processes and the production of sustainable fuels. For this project, Synhelion and University of Florida (UF) will jointly develop a solar reactor powered by high-temperature solar thermal energy to produce hydrogen gas from water and sunlight. The hydrogen produced can then be stored, transported, and utilized on demand, for example in transportation sectors that are focused on decarbonizing their industries.
“By leveraging Synhelion’s technological expertise, we are able to integrate new materials into solar thermal processes, which have the potential to lower hydrogen production costs,” said project Principle Investigator Jonathan Scheffe, Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering of the Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering at UF.
Read more about University of Florida and Synhelion To Scale Up Solar Hydrogen Energy Solution.