A curtailed wind farm is generating electricity nobody can take. It is the cheapest energy on the grid at that moment and its value is zero. Converting it to hydrogen is an obvious idea; the question is what you store the hydrogen in — and this is the one application where the usual objection to solid-state largely dissolves.
The standard argument against magnesium storage is the desorption heat: you need roughly 375 °C to get the hydrogen back, and finding that heat is somebody's problem. On a curtailment site it is much less of a problem, because the same surplus electricity that had nowhere to go can make heat — at exactly the moment it is worthless.
That does not make heat free at the moment of discharge, which is a separate design question. But it removes the awkwardness on the charging side, and the round-trip penalty is being paid in energy that had no alternative buyer.
This is not an argument that hydrogen beats batteries. For short-duration grid services batteries win on efficiency, and they win clearly. The two do different jobs.
A wind or solar site is often remote, unstaffed for long periods and exposed to weather. Storing hydrogen at ambient pressure rather than 350–700 bar changes the risk profile of leaving it there, and it removes the compressor — a rotating machine with a maintenance schedule, on a site nobody visits daily.
| Compressed tube trailer | Carries a few hundred kilograms of hydrogen per truck at high pressure. Mature, fast to fill and empty, with a transport risk regulators already have rules for. |
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| Solid-state | Much heavier per kilogram of hydrogen — roughly 15 tonnes of material per tonne of H₂ at our catalysed capacities, before the vessel. In exchange: no high pressure in transit, and a very different incident case. |
Curtailment is intermittent and often short. A charging window that closes before the bed is full is a wasted event, so absorption speed is not a nicety — it determines how many curtailment events you can actually capture in a year. The peer-reviewed figures for our catalysed system are 446 s absorption and 735 s desorption at 375 °C, against uncatalysed magnesium where absorption is commonly discussed in hours. Citations and DOIs.
As always: laboratory results on ECAP- and HEBM-processed composites. They tell you what the catalyst enables, not what your bed will do.
Not on efficiency, and not for short durations. Batteries win there clearly. Hydrogen becomes interesting when the gap between surplus and demand is days or weeks, when you want no self-discharge, or when the hydrogen itself can be sold as a product.
On the charging side, from the same surplus electricity that was being curtailed. On the discharge side it is a separate design question that must be answered explicitly, not assumed. If your receiving site has no heat, say so early.
On payload, no, and we will not pretend otherwise. Solid-state becomes interesting when pressure rather than weight is the binding constraint, such as restricted routes or receiving sites that cannot take a high-pressure connection.
The Pd/MWCNT catalyst for the magnesium bed. Bed design, heat integration and site engineering are yours or a joint development.
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