The UK’s Nottingham University plans to use a hydrogen-based system to store renewably generated energy in a residential microgrid.

The deployment is part of the university’s Creative Energy Homes (CEH) project, which aims to stimulate ideas for sustainable design and promote new ways to provide affordable, environmentally sustainable and innovative housing.

Under a new phase of the CEH project, the university plans to store surplus solar and wind energy using a solid hydrogen system from France’s  McPhy Energy. The system is aimed at enabling greater energy autonomy for the residential microgrid.

“Having a combination of energy stores will provide a more robust system, with McPhy Energy’s solid hydrogen tanks used primarily for mid-term energy storage, and using batteries for short term energy requirements,” said Gavin Walker, professor of sustainable energy at the university. “Determining the best way of using both hydrogen and fuel cells within a microgrid is an important question that still needs to be addressed.”

Homes built as part of the university’s CEH project incorporate a range of low-carbon technologies, including renewable microgeneration from solar, wind and ground-source heat pumps. The houses have operated individually using only the renewable energy generated at that property. However, a practical, multi-home storage solution for surplus energy is needed to cover peak periods, especially after sundown and during periods of little or no wind.

The university plans to test such a storage system by building a microgrid that will provide energy management across several houses. One aspect it will investigate is how well surplus energy can be stored using McPhy’s MCP-N-4 magnesium hydride-based storage tank on the microgrid. Hydrogen from the system will be used to feed fuel cells for power on an as-needed basis.

“This marks our first foray into the dynamic UK renewable energy market,” said Pascal Mauberger, CEO of McPhy Energy. “While we are involved in many industrial-scale projects, we believe Nottingham University’s Creative Energy Homes is the first in the world to investigate the use of solid hydrogen as a mid-term solution for energy autonomy on a residential microgrid scale.”

While hydrogen has long been considered as a way to store energy, systems typically require high-pressure storage, which can raise security concerns. McPhy’s system, however, uses solid magnesium hydrides that it claims are low cost, environmentally friendly, readily available and fully recyclable.

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