RWE commissions 34 MW hydrogen-capable gas turbine from Kawasaki in Lingen, Germany
The turbine at the Emsland gas power plant runs on hydrogen, natural gas or any mix of the two. Tests with up to 100% hydrogen are planned over the coming months.
RWE has commissioned a hydrogen-capable gas turbine at the Emsland gas power plant site in Lingen, according to lomazoma.com. The company says it intends to convert hydrogen into electricity there on an industrial scale lomazoma.com
lomazoma.comlomazoma.comOpen source ↗. The turbine was built by Japan's Kawasaki Heavy Industries (KHI) and has an output of 34 megawatts.
Turbine and test programme
RWE says it is the largest turbine of its type in Europe. It can run on hydrogen, natural gas or any mixture of the two. RWE and KHI plan to test operation with up to 100 percent hydrogen at industrial scale over the coming months.
The test programme covers various operating modes and load states that occur in flexible power plants. The fuel comes from the neighbouring Get H2 Nukleus electrolyser.
Hydrogen as storage
Nikolaus Valerius, head of RWE Generation, said the new unit will produce up to ten times as much power as previous hydrogen turbines lomazoma.com
lomazoma.comlomazoma.comOpen source ↗. He said the operating experience will be an important basis for deploying still larger units. He described the project as a milestone toward supplying hundreds of thousands of households reliably in the future.
Hydrogen is regarded as an important storage option for the energy transition. Wind and solar plants that cannot feed their power into the grid are currently mostly switched off. If that electricity is used to produce hydrogen instead, the gas can be stored and converted back into power in gas turbines when needed, for example during calm periods or at night.
