Hydrogen Storage Technology Development to Aid Energy Resilience

Photo credit: Vo Thong on Unsplash

With the rise in renewable energy as well as increasing uncertainty associated with outages due to power surges and extreme weather events, energy storage plays a key role in ensuring reliable power supply to critical infrastructure such as healthcare facilities, data centers, and telecommunications. Hydrogen shows promise as an energy storage solution, and researchers are developing materials that can help store hydrogen for long durations at low cost and high energy efficiency.

A team of researchers led by Berkeley Lab along with support from the Department of Energy’s Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technologies Office, have examined backup power systems based on sponge-like materials called metal-organic frameworks, or MOFs, and found that with further research and development, they could be cost-competitive with other energy storage technologies for backup power. MOFs are porous crystal materials made of metal ions, where large pores within the crystals can store hydrogen gas. As part of DOE’s Hydrogen Materials Advanced Research Consortium (HyMARC), and working with researchers from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and UC Berkeley, the team used techno-economic analysis and process modeling to analyze system performance. Their study is published in Nature Energy.