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It's a wind-wind technology deal

Xcel teams with lab to produce hydrogen in $2 million project

Gargi Chakrabarty, Rocky Mountain News

Published December 15, 2006 at midnight

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Wind2H2.

The name of the project symbolizes a $2 million partnership between Xcel Energy and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory to use wind energy to produce hydrogen, or H2.

The stored hydrogen could be used in fuel cell or gas turbines to generate electricity at a modest cost, especially during peak demand hours when the price of electricity in the open market shoots up.

Xcel Chairman, CEO and President Dick Kelly and NREL Director Dan Arvizu kicked off the project Thursday at the federal lab's wind center between Golden and Boulder.

"Today we begin using our cleanest source of electricity - wind power - to create the perfect fuel: hydrogen," Kelly said at ground-breaking ceremony in the National Wind Technology Center. "Converting wind energy to hydrogen means that it doesn't matter when the wind blows since its energy can be stored on-site in the form of hydrogen."

Sen. Ken Salazar, D-Colo., Sen. Wayne Allard, R-Colo., and Rep. Mark Udall, D-Boulder, attended the ceremony, along with officials from the U.S. Department of Energy, which owns NREL, and the Governor's Office of Energy Management and Conservation.

Xcel plans to invest more than $1.25 million in the partnership. NREL and the Department of Energy will invest about $750,000.

The plan is to research technologies to use wind power to extract hydrogen from water and store the hydrogen in special containers. The gas subsequently can be used to make various products, including electricity and transportation fuel.

The research site boasts a new building with electrolyzers, or machines that extract hydrogen from water using wind power, a device to compress the hydrogen for storage, four large tanks to store the hydrogen and a control room where computers monitor the process.

The research is expected to be completed by 2008. At that time, Xcel will move the equipment to another location in Colorado.

Currently, the cheapest way to derive hydrogen is from hydrocarbons, mostly natural gas. But the process emits greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Using wind energy to electrolyze water and derive hydrogen is clean and there are no emission problems, but the process costs about four times as much as commercially available hydrogen.

NREL scientists are seeking to reduce the cost.

The idea is to make the whole process - from generating wind power to using it to produce hydrogen and finally using hydrogen to make electricity - comparable to the market price of peak-hour electricity, NREL's Arvizu said, adding that Xcel is the main force behind the partnership.

Kelly said he thought of the project two years ago, just as Xcel was ramping up its wind power generation. The utility is the largest retail provider of wind power in the nation.

If the project is successful, Kelly said, wind-generated hydrogen could be used to power shopping malls or other venues, or even used to fuel fleets of vehicles in coming years.

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