Salt Lake City: Mitsubishi Hitachi Power Systems (MHPS), Magnum Development and Utah Governor Gary Herbert announced an initiative May 30 to launch what they say will be the world’s largest project of its kind. The Advanced Clean Energy Storage (ACES) project in central Utah will develop 1,000 megawatts of storage entirely based on clean energy.
MHPS has developed gas turbine technology that enables a mixture of renewable hydrogen and natural gas to produce power with low carbon emissions. The MHPS technology roadmap aims to use 100 percent renewable hydrogen as a fuel source, which will allow gas turbines to produce electricity with zero carbon emissions. The natural gas component is to be phased out as the gas turbines are converted to use pure hydrogen.
Magnum Development owns and controls the only known “Gulf Coast” style domal-quality salt formation in the western United States. Such formations can effectively store hydrogen without leakage. With five salt caverns already in operation for liquid fuels storage, Magnum is also developing Compressed Air Energy Storage and renewable hydrogen storage options. Strategically located adjacent to the Intermountain Power Project, the Magnum site is positioned to integrate with the western U.S. power grid utilizing existing infrastructure.
Initially developing enough energy storage to completely serve the needs of 150,000 households for an entire year, the ACES initiative will deploy four types of clean energy storage at utility scale: hydrogen from renewable sources, compressed air, large scale flow batteries and solid oxide fuel cells.
“The technologies we are deploying will store electricity on time scales from seconds to seasons of the year,” said Paul Browning, President and CEO of MHPS Americas. “For example, when we add gas turbines powered with renewable hydrogen to a hydrogen storage salt-dome, we have a solution that stores and generates electricity with zero carbon emissions.”
The ACES project will engineer, finance, construct, own, and operate facilities to be located in Millard County, Utah. Over the coming weeks and months, additional strategic and financial partners will be invited to participate.