Winners of Hydrogen TCP Awards of Excellence 2024

The EU Project SWITCH - Smart ways for in-situ totally integrated and continuous multisource generation of hydrogen - has been honoured, among 23 competitors, with an Award of Excellence 2024, given by the IEA Hydrogen Technical Collaboration Programme (TCP) and the Clean Energy Ministerial Hydrogen Initiative (CEM-H2I). https://switch-fch.eu/

The SWITCH project (2020-2024), funded by Clean Hydrogen Europe under Grant Agreement 875148, was coordinated by FBK, Trento (Italy), with EPFL, SolydEra (CH/IT), DLR (D), Shell (NL), HyGear (NL) and SWECO (POL) as partners. EPFL co-designed the layout of a reversible Solid Oxide System capable of switching between different operating modes : electrolysis of steam (storage of electricity as H2), conversion of natural gas to power and heat (cogeneration mode), conversion of natural gas to H2 (involving shift reaction, pressure swing adsorption, drying, compression). The hardware system including control and safety was realised mostly by SolydEra and HyGear, and successfully validated in April-May 2024, achieving targets of 75 kWe steam electrolysis, 20 kWe fuel cell operation, and 8 bar dry H2 compression. EPFL performed SWITCH-mode operation also on a short stack in its laboratory to assist the behaviour analysis (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.electacta.2023.143627), and furthermore performed Life Cycle Analysis of the system, the conclusions of which are available on the SWITCH website https://switch-fch.eu/