New Community of Practice Electrolysis helps accelerate testing and scaling of hydrogen technology
The Netherlands wants to transition more quickly to clean energy and sees green hydrogen as an important solution in that effort. To help speed up this development, the Community of Practice for Electrolysis (COPE) was launched during the World Hydrogen Summit: a new platform by GroenvermogenNL and TNO that brings together companies, researchers, and test facilities to test and scale up hydrogen technology faster and more effectively.
Green hydrogen is produced using renewable electricity and is considered an important building block for a climate-neutral industry. In sectors such as chemicals, steel, and refining in particular, hydrogen can replace fossil-based feedstocks. It can also help relieve grid congestion by converting surplus renewable electricity into hydrogen for later use.
Electrolysers are needed to produce green hydrogen: installations that use water and electricity to generate hydrogen and oxygen. This technology is developing rapidly, but the step from laboratory to large-scale application remains complex and costly. In particular, there is still a lack of adequate testing opportunities and shared standards.
Community of Practice Electrolysis
The Community of Practice for Electrolysis (COPE) aims to change that. The platform helps companies and researchers find the right test facilities and encourages collaboration on test data, lifetime studies, and testing methods. COPE also aims to connect existing test sites more effectively, so that available infrastructure can be used more intelligently.
Hydrogen plants
“Scaling up green hydrogen requires collaboration in testing across the entire value chain,” says Thijs de Groot, Professor of Electrochemical Engineering at Eindhoven University of Technology. According to him, the sector is still very much under development. “In fact, all hydrogen plants currently being built are still demonstration projects. What happens there is essentially large-scale testing.”
According to De Groot, companies and researchers can learn faster by sharing knowledge and practical experience more effectively. “Almost every large-scale electrolysis project takes longer than initially estimated. If we do not share enough knowledge and data, we risk making the same mistakes over and over again.” In his view, more attention should be paid in particular to research into the lifetime, reliability, and degradation of electrolysers. “Universities cannot carry out such long-term practical tests themselves in the way companies can with their installations. Without that practical data, we simply do not properly understand why electrolysers break down and how quickly that happens.”
He also says that there is still much to gain in the area of testing methods. “There is not yet a good standard, and everyone is still searching.” COPE should therefore also contribute to greater harmonization of testing protocols and better cooperation between companies, knowledge institutions, and existing initiatives such as HyPRO.
Overview of test facilities
In the coming period, COPE will focus, among other things, on developing shared testing protocols, mapping available testing capacity, and improving agreements on data exchange and collaboration. An initial inventory of existing test facilities has already been published in a paper.
Strong testing ecosystem
According to GroenvermogenNL and TNO, collaboration is essential to make green hydrogen affordable and scalable more quickly. “Scaling up requires more than technology alone,” says Ed Buddenbaum of GroenvermogenNL. “It requires a strong ecosystem in which companies can test, learn, and collaborate.” Tara van Abkoude of TNO adds: “No single party can develop this market on its own. With COPE, we are creating a platform where parties not only share knowledge, but also implement and execute together.”
