The agreement signed by Enel Green Power and Sapio focuses on activating a supply of green hydrogen produced using renewable energy from the Carlentini wind farm in eastern Sicily.
The agreement calls for the sale to Sapio of green hydrogen produced, stored, and made available at Enel Green Power’s futuristic NextHy initiative’s Carlentini and Sortino production sites beginning in 2023. Sapio will be in charge of expanding the market and handling renewable hydrogen distribution to end users.
The annual supply foreseen in the agreement is for the estimated 200+ tons of production capacity of the Sicilian hub. Green hydrogen will be produced primarily by a 4 MW electrolyzer, which will be powered entirely by renewable energy from the existing wind farm, and to a lesser extent by the platform’s state-of-the-art electrolysis systems. Enel Green Power’s Hydrogen Industrial Lab, which opened in September 2021, is a one-of-a-kind industrial laboratory where production activity is constantly accompanied by technological research. There are also areas dedicated to testing new electrolyzers, components such as valves and compressors, and innovative liquid and solid storage systems based on liquid and solid means of storage: in line with Enel’s open-ended approach, this activity will be open to the collaboration of more than 25 entities, including partners, stakeholders, and innovative startups, in addition to the sectors reserved for full-scale production. The entire complex is undergoing an environmental impact assessment at the Department of Land and Environment of the Sicily Region.
Green hydrogen will now not only be produced, stored, and moved on an industrial scale at NextHy, but also purchased and used by companies that have recognized that green hydrogen is the solution for decarbonizing their production processes, thanks to the agreement with Sapio. In this context, the Enel Green Power laboratory team will use this experimental approach, which is open to external contributions, to test the project on an industrial scale in order to create the best conditions for a commercial environment that can take advantage of all current and future technologies for the generation, storage, and transportation of green hydrogen. It’s an initiative in line with Enel’s Open Innovability® philosophy, which emphasizes innovation, ideas, and their transformation into reality in order to meet the challenges of the energy transition.
