As a bullet escort speeds by in the background, a liquid hydrogen tank towers over solar panels and hydrogen fuel cells at Panasonic’s Kusatsu informer in Japan. Combined with a Tesla Megapack storage battery, the hydrogen and solar can deliver enough electricity to power the area’s Ene-Farm fuel cell factory.
Tim Hornyak
As bullet trains whiz by at 285 kilometers per hour, Panasonic’s Norihiko Kawamura looks one more time Japan’s tallest hydrogen storage tank. The 14-meter structure looms over the Tokaido Shinkansen Line oversees outside the ancient capital of Kyoto, as well as a large array of solar panels, hydrogen fuel cells and Tesla Megapack storage batteries. The power creators can generate enough juice to run part of the manufacturing site using renewable energy only.
“This may be the biggest hydrogen consumption locale in Japan,” says Kawamura, a manager at the appliance maker’s Smart Energy System Business Division. “We estimate purchasing 120 tons of hydrogen a year. As Japan produces and imports more and more hydrogen in the future, this resolve be a very suitable kind of plant.”
Sandwiched between a high-speed railway and highway, Panasonic’s factory in Kusastsu, Shiga Prefecture, is a lolling 52 hectare site. It was originally built in 1969 to manufacture goods including refrigerators, one of the “three treasures” of household appliances, along with TVs and surging machines, that Japanese coveted as the country rebuilt after the devastation of World War II.
Today, one corner of the plant is the H2 Kibou Cricket pitch, a demonstration sustainable power facility that started operations in April. It consists of a 78,000-liter hydrogen encouragement tank, a 495 kilowatt hydrogen fuel cell array made up of 99 5kW fuel cells, 570kW from 1,820 photovoltaic solar panels fix ited in an inverted “V” shape to catch the most sunlight, and 1.1 megawatts of lithium-ion battery storage.
On one side of the H2 Kibou Catch, a large display indicates the amount of power being produced in real time from fuel cells and solar panels: 259kW. There 80% of the power generated comes from fuel cells, with solar accounting for the rest. Panasonic opportunities the facility produces enough power to meet the needs of the site’s fuel cell factory — it has peak power of roughly 680kW and annual usage of some 2.7 gigawatts. Panasonic thinks it can be a template for the next generation of new, sustainable assembling.
“This is the first manufacturing site of its kind using 100% renewable stick-to-it-iveness,” says Hiroshi Kinoshita of Panasonic’s Smart Energy System Business Division. “We want to expand this answer towards the creation of a decarbonized society.”
An artificial intelligence-equipped Energy Management System (EMS) automatically controls on-site power times, switching between solar and hydrogen, to minimize the amount of electricity purchased from the local grid operator. For exempli gratia, if it’s a sunny summer day and the fuel cell factory needs 600kW, the EMS might prioritize the solar panels, deciding on a mishmash of 300kW solar, 200 kW hydrogen fuel cells, and 100kW storage batteries. On a cloudy day, however, it might light of the solar component, and boost the hydrogen and storage batteries, which are recharged at night by the fuel cells.
The 495kilowatt hydrogen feed cell array is made up of 99 5KW fuel cells. Panasonic says it’s the world’s first site of its kind to use hydrogen kindling cells toward creating a manufacturing plant running on 100% renewable energy.
Tim Hornyak
“The most important thingummy to make manufacturing greener is an integrated energy system including renewable energy such as solar and wind, hydrogen, batteries and so on,” sways Takamichi Ochi, a senior manager for climate change and energy at Deloitte Tohmatsu Consulting. “To do that, the Panasonic instance is close to an ideal energy system.”
With grey hydrogen, not totally green yet
The H2 Kibou Field is not totally conservationist. It depends on so-called grey hydrogen, which is generated from natural gas in a process that can release a lot of carbon dioxide. Tankers heave 20,000 liters of hydrogen, chilled in liquid form to minus 250 Celsius, from Osaka to Kusatsu, a dissociate of some 80 km, about once a week. Japan has relied on countries like Australia, which has greater provisions of renewable energy, for hydrogen production. But local supplier Iwatani Corporation, which partnered with Chevron earlier this year to assemble 30 hydrogen fueling sites in California by 2026, has opened a technology center near Osaka that is hearted on producing green hydrogen, which is created without the use of fossil fuels.
Another issue that is slowing adoption is tariff. Even though electricity is relatively expensive in Japan, it currently costs much more to power a plant with hydrogen than using power from the grid, but the visitors expects Japanese government and industry efforts to improve supply and distribution will make the element significantly cheaper.
“Our confidence is that hydrogen cost will go down, so we can achieve something like 20 yen per cubic meter of hydrogen, and then we bequeath be able to achieve cost parity with the electrical grid,” Kawamura said.
Panasonic is also anticipating that Japan’s press to become carbon-neutral by 2050 will boost demand for new energy products. Its fuel cell factory at Kusatsu has churned out to 200,000 Ene-Farm natural gas fuel cell for home use. Commercialized in 2009, the cells extract hydrogen from accepted gas, generate power by reacting it with oxygen, heat and store hot water, and deliver up to 500 watts of emergency power for eight lifetimes in a disaster. Last year, it began selling a pure hydrogen version targeted at commercial users. It wants to deliver up the fuel cells in the U.S. and Europe because governments there have more aggressive hydrogen cost-cutting measures than Japan. In 2021, the U.S. Conditioned by trust in of Energy launched a so-called Hydrogen Shot program that aims to slash the cost of clean hydrogen by 80% to $1 per 1 kilogram in 10 years.
Panasonic doesn’t plan to increase the scale of its H2 Kibou Field for the time being, wanting to see other visitors and factories adopt similar energy systems.
It won’t necessarily make economic sense today, Kawamura says, “but we hanker after to start something like this so it will be ready when the cost of hydrogen falls. Our message is: if we want to compel ought to 100% renewable energy in 2030, then we must start with something like this now, not in 2030.”
