Enel Green Power and Sapio have signed an agreement to activate green hydrogen produced using renewable energy from the Carlentini wind farm in eastern Sicily, Italy.
The agreement provides for the sale to Sapio of the green hydrogen that will be produced, stored and made available from 2023 at the Carlentini and Sortino production sites, home to Enel Green Power’s NextHy initiative.
Sapio will be responsible for developing the market and handling the distribution of renewable hydrogen to the end customer.
Enel Green Power chief executive Salvatore Bernabei said: “In contexts where electrification is not easily achievable, green hydrogen is the key solution for decarbonisation as it is emission-free and offers promising development prospects.
“For this reason we are excited about the agreement with Sapio. It is an agreement that looks to the future by combining technological innovation and sustainable production.”
Sapio Group president Alberto Dossi said: “Sapio is strongly committed to contributing to the EU’s achievement of the UN SDGs, and with this project we are taking a firm step towards sustainable development in our country.
“The agreement with EGP also gives us the opportunity to integrate green hydrogen into our business model, which is based on our strong technological expertise in hydrogen and its distribution over 100 years in business.
“In this way we will also be able to give further support to the industrial activities we are already carrying out in Sicily.”
An estimated 200+ tonnes of production capacity from the Sicilian hub is the subject of the annual supply foreseen in the agreement.
Once fully operational, the green hydrogen will be produced mainly by a 4MW electrolyzer, which is powered exclusively by the renewable energy of the existing wind farm, and to a lesser extent by the state-of-the-art electrolysis systems tested in the platform.
Launched by Enel Green Power in September 2021, NextHy’s Hydrogen Industrial Lab is an example of an industrial laboratory in which production activity is constantly accompanied by technological research
Thanks to the agreement with Sapio, at NextHy green hydrogen will now not only be produced, stored and moved on an industrial scale, but also purchased and used by companies that have understood that green hydrogen is the solution for decarbonizing their production processes.
In this context, this experimental approach that is open to external contributions will allow the Enel Green Power laboratory team to test the project on an industrial scale, so as to create the best conditions for a commercial environment that can make the most of all present and future technologies for the generation, storage and transport of green hydrogen, the company said.