Joint Venture With Linde AG And £38M Strategic Investment
The title of this post, is the same as that as this Press Release from ITM Power.
This is the first paragraph.
ITM Power plc is pleased to announce its intention to raise at least £52.0 million (before expenses) through (i) a strategic investment of £38.0 million at 40 pence per share by Linde UK Holdings No. 2 Limited, a member of the Linde AG group (Linde) (the Share Subscription); and (ii) a conditional placing of £14.0 million at 40 pence per share (the Firm Placed Shares) with certain existing and new institutional investors (the Firm Placing). The Group has also entered into a 50/50 joint venture with Linde (the Joint Venture) which will focus on delivering green hydrogen to large scale industrial projects, principally those with an installed electrolyser capacity of 10 Megawatts (“MW”) and above.
There is all the usual financial stuff and these sentences.
The net proceeds of the fundraising will be used principally to enhance the manufacturing capabilities of the Group, particularly for the development and production of large scale 5MW electrolysers, to facilitate product standardisation and manufacturing cost reduction.
The Joint Venture will focus on delivering green hydrogen to large scale industrial projects (generally being opportunities with installed electrolyser capacities of 10 Megawatts and above)
As ITM Power are constructing the largest electrolyser factory in the world, at Bessemer park in Sheffield, it appears to me that ITM Power are going for the larger scale hydrogen market.
Recently, I wrote these three posts.
- Funding Award to Supply An 8MW Electrolyser
- Surplus Electricity From Wind Farms To Make Hydrogen For Cars And Buses
- H2OzBus Project: Deploying Hydrogen Fuel Cell Bus Fleets For Public Transport Across Australia
News stories generated about the company or the production of hydrogen seem to require large electrolysers in excess of 5 MW.
It looks like ITM Power are setting themselves up to tap this market substantially.
How Much Hydrogen Would A 5 MW Electrolyser Create In A Day?
I found the key to the answer to this question on this page of the Clean Energy Partnership web site.
To produce hydrogen by electrolysis directly at the filling station, the CEP currently requires about 55 kWh/kg H2 of electricity at an assumed rate of efficiency of > 60 percent.
To produce 1 kg of hydrogen, nine times the amount of water is necessary, i.e. nine litres.
I will use that figure in the calculation.
- A 5MW electrolyser will consume 120 MWh in twenty-four hours.
- This amount of electricity will produce 2,182 Kg or 2.182 tonnes of hydrogen.
- It will also consume 19.64 tonnes of water.
In Surplus Electricity From Wind Farms To Make Hydrogen For Cars And Buses, I described how Jo Bamford and his company; Ryze Hydrogen, have applied for planning permission to build the UK’s largest electrolyser at Herne Bay in Kent.
- It will produce ten tonnes of hydrogen a day.
- The hydrogen will be sent by road to London to power buses.
So could the electrolyser be a 25 MW unit built of five 5 MW modular electrolysers?
Linde and their UK subsidiary; BOC, must have a lot of knowledge in transporting tonnes of hydrogen by road. I can remember seeing BOC’s trucks behind ICI’s Castner-Kellner works in the 1970s, where they collected hydrogen to see to other companies.
Zopa Seems To Have Deconstipated
In early March, I wrote Is The COVID-19 Having An Affect On Lending At Zopa?, where I said this.
I lend money on Zopa and at the moment no-one seems to be borrowing any money.
I put some of my pension in my lending pot into the peer-to-peer lender each month and it’s still there sitting safely in the queue for a borrower.
Perhaps everybody is being cautious because of the COVID-19 alert.
At the time of writing this new post, everything seems to be back to normal. Or at least money, that I put in my lending account yesterday, has now been allocated to borrowers and is awaiting the final checks.
Eight years ago, I wrote Stability in Financial Systems, where I put forward my belief that Zopa is a stable system, that adjusts itself to the conditions it encounters.
Has the peer-to-peer lender just demonstrated, that my thoughts are correct, by sailing untroubled through the COVID-19 crisis, with just a small adjustment on the tiller here and there, just as it survived the Banking Crisis of 2008?