John Batterham and Paul Cockram of Uniper, and Tomasz Pozarlik and Rebecca Mclean from GeoPura.

For the first time, Uniper has used green hydrogen to power a planned outage at one of its gas-fired plants.

Cottam Development Centre is a 445MW natural gas power station in Nottinghamshire, England.

It undergoes routine maintenance outages every four-to-five years, which requires a secure backup power supply when the plant is disconnected from the main grid, usually involving using diesel generators.

However, this time Uniper used a hydrogen power unit developed by GeoPura to power the plant, which has Siemens Energy as its equipment contractor.

A unit is housed in a standard 20ft shipping container and built on industrial hydrogen fuel cells. It provides 250kW electrical output, 80kW thermal power and 216kWh battery storage.

At the Cottam plant, it was used to power the outage village, including welfare facilities and EV charging for all electric vehicles on site.

Uniper said using the unit saved 94 tonnes of carbon dioxide during the three-month outage.

The green hydrogen is produced locally by GeoPura using renewable energy from a biomass facility approximately eight miles away.

Tom Kavanagh, Plant Manager for Cottam Development Centre, said that Uniper “will share the lessons learned from using this technology across our fleet of UK power stations”. 

Siemens Energy is working in collaboration with GeoPura to scale up the production of the units and accelerate their deployment.

Darren Davidson, Managing Director of Siemens Energy Gas Services UK, said that initially the hydrogen unit “was primarily being used to power the contactor cabins and provide EV charging, however, once established and the technology was proven to be reliable on site, its use was extended to replace an additional two diesel generators”.

“Due to increased flexibility the system offers, the HPU was more than capable of supporting this additional load and provided even greater savings than originally planned.”