Hydrogen Utilisation & Green Energy

Closed

HUGE aims to address the necessity for assessing the hydrogen renewable energy chain from production through storage, transport and on to the end-user in the Northern Periphery and Arctic (NPA) region. Many communities in the NPA are challenged by low economic diversity, resulting from their peripheral locations, dispersed demography and lack of critical mass. Simultaneously those remote, peripheral locations, have some of the best renewable energy resources in the world. On many occasions, if renewables are implemented, the generated electricity/heat is more than that required and utilised by the local population. At the same time the electric grid infrastructure in many of the remote locations is underdeveloped, resulting in the curtailment of green electricity production, and inefficient resource use as clean energy is left unexploited. Similar situations are encountered by communities/households living off-grid where excess energy is not harnessed, where otherwise it could be put into use if mechanisms existed. HUGE aims to overcome these barriers and challenges by building up capacity in communities to exploit the abundance of natural resources to their full potential. HUGE will achieve this by identifying viable technical processes for small scale operation, assessing feasible technical processes, and creating an operational, hydrogen utilisation business (HUB) model for communities to implement. The main advantage of hydrogen is that it is a flexible energy carrier, it can be produced from any regionally prevalent energy source and effectively transformed into any form of energy for diverse end-use applications - electricity, heat and transport. HUGE’s immediate targeted opportunity is diversifying the economy of remote, peripheral communities by developing the HUB model for local hydrogen supply chain development, while at the same time providing communities with energy security.

Medium