"I don't see utilities, in five years' or 10 years' time, still having these stakes." They just want to have an outlet for their wind and solar farms," Mammadov said. The same might conceivably happen in hydrogen.
After the wind supply chain came of age, there may have been little incentive to keep the stake, and Iberdrola cashed out in 2020. Iberdrola slowly built up a stake in Gamesa until it owned almost 20% of the company at the time of its merger with Siemens in 2016. But he said the strategy is unlikely to become mainstream and most utilities will probably look to off-load the investments again once the market is well established. Mammadov said he expects more utilities to take stakes in hydrogen equipment makers, either directly or through their venture capital arms. "We want to retain the exposure to the technology at a time when we see really the bottleneck being on the manufacturing side and on the technology side," he said. Snam's CEO, Marco Alverà, also emphasized the point of putting money into equipment production when he presented the acquisition of De Nora in November 2020. "They want to get things quickly off the ground," Mammadov said.Ī Siemens electrolyzer at a research facility in Austria. If infrastructure for using hydrogen in heating, transport and industrial plants gets built, producing the fuel could require vast amounts of gas and electricity, the companies' core commodities.
Siemens' sprawling energy business also makes electrolyzers.Įlchin Mammadov, a utilities analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, said the utilities have a strong interest in spurring quicker deployment of the technology.
And German power producer Uniper SE has signed a similar agreement with Siemens Gas and Power, now Siemens Energy AG, to look at using Uniper's existing gas turbines and gas storage facilities for hydrogen. In their bid to secure access to hydrogen technology, other power producers have also strengthened ties with manufacturers even when they have stopped short of investing in them directly - at least so far.Īside from its Iberlyzer venture, Iberdrola is also working closely with Nel ASA, a Norwegian competitor to ITM, to jointly develop hydrogen plants.
Tech utilities activation key 2016 how to#
The company has bought minority stakes in both ITM Power PLC, one of the largest electrolyzer makers, and Industrie De Nora SpA, which mainly produces electrodes for those units and also owns part of an installation company involved in several hydrogen projects.Īn accelerating push by governments to develop hydrogen production has already led a slew of other power companies to launch projects, beef up their internal teams and jointly plot how to drive down the cost of the fuel. Snam SpA, the Italian gas pipeline operator, has moved even more aggressively into the hydrogen supply chain. The goal for Iberdrola is not to become a manufacturer, but rather boost the industrialization of the hydrogen business, he said. in the same way as Gamesa did in the early days of the wind industry," Diego Díaz Pilas, head of new ventures and technology prospects at Iberdrola, told analysts in December last year. "What we want is for Iberlyzer to fulfill the market need. In late 2020, the company announced a new joint venture with technology provider Ingeteam SA, dubbed Iberlyzer, that aims to become Spain's first integrator of electrolyzer projects, including those already being developed by Iberdrola in the country. Now Iberdrola is following its own playbook to drive ahead the nascent market for large-scale electrolysis, which presents a potentially vast opportunity for utilities to use and sell their electricity. The Spanish utility first put money in Gamesa, which later merged with Siemens AG's wind business, in 1990 - a time when the wind market was still in its infancy.
Source: Snam SpAĪs utilities build out their burgeoning hydrogen businesses, some have made a rare foray outside their traditional expertise, investing directly in the technology and equipment being used to produce the fuel.Īlthough the move by European power companies is unusual, it is not without precedent: Iberdrola SA until recently held a minority stake in wind-turbine maker Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy SA. Companies like Snam are betting on hydrogen as a future-proof alternative to natural gas. A compressor station operated by gas utility Snam in Italy.
0 kommentar(er)
