Elcogen’s mission is to be instrumental in realising the potential for distributed power generation from deploying SOFCs, the most efficient fuel cells when it comes to converting fuel to power and heat (CHP). However, there are two main obstacles to successful mass commercialisation: high manufacturing cost and insufficient life-time. Elcogen's SOFCs have best-in-class electrical efficiency of 74%, their lower operating temperature allows lower cost (up to 76%) fuel cell systems to be produced by CHP system manufacturers. They are fully validated for standard manufacturing techniques, are fully tested by customers and approved as the best performing. Over the last 5 years Elcogen has developed the market for CHP (combined heat and power) and has now received purchase commitments from several customers. It has signed agreements with three key CHP Sumitomo Precision Products and LOI’s from SolidPower (Italy) and Convion (Finland). They are now waiting for large volume deliveries from Elcogen. Manufacturing scale up is a top priority now. Elcogen needs to plan the manufacturing plant scale-up with initial capacity of 2m cells p.a., envisaging revenues of €57m and EBITDA of €36m in 2023. The feasibility of the deployment of standard manufacturing equipment has been established during a Phase 1 study. It will be possible to reduce cell manufacturing cost by nearly 90% to €5 by 2021, compared with €40 for the current 2nd generation. Elcogen will deploy a cost-effective method for mass production of SOFCs, cutting fuel cell system costs by 65% compared with current system costs. This will open the path to widespread adoption of stationary power generation, unlocking a €25bn+ market for fuel cell systems, of which ~ 1/3rd will be for SOFC unit cells. The ramp-up of sales volumes sales in stationary and automotive applications will make the cells cost-effective for mass electrolyser applications.

The production and use of clean H2 is a key lever for the decarbonation of industries, as a fuel for transportation and as a storage vector for renewable electricity at large scale. The RePowerEU plan, for saving energy, producing clean energy, and diversifying energy supplies sets out a strategy to double the previous EU renewable H2 target (10 million tons/y of domestic production +10 million tons/y of H2 imports). Meeting these targets requires the EU to significantly upscale its manufacturing capacities for innovative equipment such as electrolysers. However, using H2 requires given levels of pressure depending on applications. Thus to pave the way to the delivery of down to zero emissions of pressurised H2 at reduced cost (around 3 €/kg by 2030), PressHyous will validate the operation of a 20 kWe pressurised lab-scale device (eq. 13.5 kg H2/d) composing of a solid oxide electrolyser (SOEL) stack placed in a pressurised vessel, up to 30 bar at 1 A/cm2 and 1.3V during 4000h. PressHyous will also investigate a promising pressurised stack concept (without pressure vessel) relieving the cost of Balance of Plant. This will be tested up to 10 bar at short stack scale, at a similar current density to the stack operated in a pressurised vessel. These two stacks will integrate optimised components such as cell and sealing. PressHyous will in parallel deliver model-based insights for H2 production under pressure for up to 5 identified use cases, on expectable performances of both stack concepts (with or without pressurised vessel) towards large scale developments up to 100s MWe, in strong link with techno-economic and life-cycle analysis. PressHyous consortium gathers a large portfolio of skills from modelling to system manufacturing, and a wide range of partners (RTOs and industrials) all along the value chain. The scientific and technological activities are all intended to strive towards the overall design and validation of future MWe large scale pressurised SOEL.

PilotSOEL will develop and demonstrate SOEL cells and stacks for high-current operation, applying advanced scalable manufacturing processes to enable SOEL production at much lower cost than for today’s state-of-the-art (SoA) products. The project will focus on innovative upscalable and low-cost SOEL component manufacturing processes with reduced use of Critical Raw Materials (CRM) and waste recycling in the cell production processes, and increase the degree of automation in the stack assembly to reduce manufacturing cost. The project will develop a novel environmentally friendly water-based tape casting process with a reduced number of process steps for half-cell production. Innovative thin protective barrier layers deposited by ALD and PVD, together with microstructural cell optimisation, will reduce the cell resistance, improving the cell performance and durability at high current operation. The dense and thin coating made by PVD will improve the oxidization resistance of the interconnector, allowing the use of cheaper alloys, and ensuring a long stack lifetime. A life-cycle assessment (LCA) and a techno-economic analysis (TEA) will be performed to benchmark the developed processes in PilotSOEL with the SoA SOEL production processes. The project is aiming to improve the SOEL processing MRL from MRL 4 at the beginning of the project to at least MRL 5 at the end of the project. The PilotSOEL consortium is formed by experienced industries and research partners with complementary competences and well-defined roles in the project, including cell and cell component development (DTU, ELCAS, Naco, Beneq), interconnector coating development (Naco, ELCOY), stack development and stack assembly process automation (ELCOY), performance validation (DTU), and finally LCA/TEA (UL) of SOEL manufacture. PilotSOEL will ensure the competitive position of key European industries/SMEs in the rapidly growing world market for electrolysis technology, taking the leadership in this area.

The main aim of OUTFOX is to remove scale as limiting factor in the deployment of SOEL technologies, while proving their potential to become the preferred option for green hydrogen production. By combining experimental results up to 80 kW scales with identification of optimal cell and system designs, OUTFOX will prepare SOEL for industrial scale systems of 100+ MW with an LCOH as low as €2.7/kg hydrogen and applicability to mass manufacturing lines. The industrially-driven OUTFOX consortium will combine expertise on cell, stack and module development, manufacturing, and full system evaluation to advance the maturity of SOEL and contribute to the targets of the Clean Hydrogen JU SRIA. OUTFOX will achieve current densities of at least 0.85 A/cm2 through the use of cells with 25% less thickness than current high volume state-of-the-art, improving sustainability through reducing total materials requirements. Scale-up will be approached from two sides: (1) development and validation of cells with geometric areas up to 800 cm2 that are compatible with at-scale manufacturing techniques, and (2) validation of optimized design concepts with increased numbers of stacks per module. The partners will validate high current density operation with reference scale (144 cm2), industrial scale (>300 cm2) and next-generation cells (900 cm2) in single repeating units, short stacks of 15 cells, and 80 kW prototype systems, leading to more than 10,000 hours of SOEL operation. Two separate 80 kW testing campaigns with two different stack configurations and a total of more than 4000 operating hours, to be tested onsite at the Shell facilities in Amsterdam, will go beyond the scope of the call text to provide a comprehensive validation of the OUTFOX technology, thus providing key data for design of a full scale 100+ MW SOEL system, including the module configuration and all balance of plant requirements, and preparing the technology for a multi-MW demonstration following the project end