Airplanes at Groningen Airport Eelde will soon be powered by hydrogen when parked on the ground. The airport announced this on Monday morning.
Holthausen Clean Technology will develop the new Ground Power Unit (GPU) in collaboration with the Province of Drenthe, KLM Equipment Service (KES) and Groningen Airport Eelde. A GPU is a generator for aircraft on the ground and the ones that are now used at the airport are mainly powered by diesel.
KES is making such a device available to the airport so that it can be used to experiment with hydrogen technology. In the hydrogen GPU being developed, the diesel engine will give way to a hydrogen powertrain. “In the coming years, in principle, all Diesel GPUs will be replaced by either H2-GPU or Battery-fed EGPU,” explains Paul Feldbrugge, Manager of Fleet Management & Engineering at Groningen Airport Eelde. “From the current pilot with E-GPUs at Schiphol, the environmental benefits are already well visible, but this solution also has disadvantages in the form of charging time and travel to a charging point. We therefore hope that with our contribution to this H2 development project we can eliminate those mentioned disadvantages.”
The results of the GPU trials will be known in the second quarter of 2023. The airport aims to make ground handling completely energy-neutral by 2030.
