Washington, D.C. (July 15, 2021) — Last week, the CHP Alliance submitted a response to the U.S. Department of Energy Hydrogen Program’s Request for Information, providing information about hydrogen-fueled CHP systems. In June, Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm launched the DOE’s Energy Earthshots Initiative to accelerate breakthroughs of more abundant, affordable, and reliable clean energy solutions within the decade. The first Energy Earthshot is the Hydrogen Shot and seeks to reduce the cost of clean hydrogen by 80% to $1 per kilogram in the next decade.
Clean hydrogen development and cost reductions for deployment will be critical to solving climate change and ensuring that the U.S. is a global leader in developing clean energy technologies and that U.S. companies secure any competitive advantages from being early adopters of such technologies. The CHP Alliance and its members see clean hydrogen used in highly efficient CHP systems as a significant opportunity to reduce emissions from the industrial and buildings sectors.
Historically, CHP units have run on traditional fuels, and many today use natural gas. This use of CHP can be thought of as “CHP 1.0,” the first wave of CHP technologies that relied on fossil fuels. However, CHP units can be fueled by hydrogen fuel, known as “CHP 2.0.” Use of hydrogen fuel can allow CHP systems to reduce emissions even further than they do under CHP 1.0. Moreover, CHP systems will use hydrogen fuel efficiently, requiring less fuel inputs for the same energy outputs compared to other generation units. Given the high cost of hydrogen, using hydrogen fuel efficiently in CHP systems will help to keep costs low and enable greenhouse gas (GHG) reductions.
Some CHP systems are already capable of running entirely on hydrogen fuel and, in the future, more CHP systems could run on fuels with higher percentage concentrations of hydrogen.
Read the full response here.
To learn more about CHP and hydrogen, read our blog post and our CHP and a Changing Climate paper, and attend our national Summit this September.