The recent Extreme E Island X race event in Sardinia was the third time the series had visited the Italian region. But it was the first outing for a new method of powering the race site and charging of the Odyssey 21 electric vehicles. Although Extreme E has used hydrogen before as an energy source for its races, a deal with Kaizen Clean Energy brokered at the end of Season 2 has now borne fruit. From now on, Extreme E will be showcasing a system that enables transportable green electricity no matter how remote its races are.
Providing reliable power for events and locations that don’t currently have adequate grid connections is usually performed by diesel generators. Even if temporary renewable sources are available, this may be intermittent and not powerful enough, so will need a supplementary backup. You can reduce the carbon footprint of diesel generators by supplying them with a greener biofuel such as HVO (hydrotreated vegetable oil) but that won’t give you zero emissions. This was Extreme E’s fallback in previous situations. But the Kaizen system enables Extreme E to use green hydrogen without the usual problems associated with sourcing and transporting this fuel.
“Working with Extreme E we’ve progressed the design to accommodate the travel necessities of the system, which is fitting it into a standard shipping container and making it ship ready,” says Robert Meaney, Cofounder of Kaizen Clean Energy, when I talked to him at the Island X Extreme E race. “We built that in about four and a half months, tested it in Texas and then shipped it out here to Sardinia to make this event this year. On site we’ve been integrated with the battery.”
The Extreme E Island X event also used an 850kWh static array derived from Zenobe second life batteries. This powered the event site and charged the Extreme E Odyssey 21 racing SUVs between sessions. The Kaizen system then fed in 150kW to keep the batteries topped up. This was supplemented with a small plot of solar panels able to deliver up to 45kW, although Andy Welch, Utilities Manager at Extreme E, reckoned it was hitting around 30kW during daylight in Sardinia.
“Our system has three main parts,” explains Meaney. “We have a reformer, our fuel cell, and our DC converter. At the event site we convert methanol and water to hydrogen. In 1,000 liters we store about 1MWh of usable energy on the back end of the fuel cell. That energy in the methanol and water is converted to hydrogen in the reformer. That hydrogen is then stored at a very low pressure, in low quantity, and used on demand by the fuel cell. We produce hydrogen on demand, and we use it on demand. Our fuel cell is a Lloyds-registered marinized approved 200kW unit and so has all the safety features necessary to meet maritime standards. But it’s also very compact. We can store it in a 20-foot container. Then we also have a DC-to-DC converter in the container, which allows us to stabilize the level of our voltage out of the system and make it ready for batteries. We get a call for power from the batteries, and we start producing power immediately.”
The Kaizen reformer can produce about 240kg of hydrogen per day, which would be enough to refuel nearly 50 Toyota Mirai fuel cell cars. However, the hydrogen used in cars is stored at 700-bar (700 times atmospheric pressure) so it doesn’t take up too much space. This is more complicated and expensive than using methanol. “The advantage of our system is that methanol stores very similarly to diesel: in plastic containers, at low cost, with low risk,” says Meaney. “This means we can transport it using standard transfer pumps, we can use standard hoses, everything that’s already had its cost curve driven down. The benefit of that is that we get very cheap hydrogen out of the backend system. Whereas you may be paying $40-60 a kilogram for delivered compressed hydrogen in the EU, we’re able to produce green hydrogen made from methanol onsite in Sardinia for less than $10 a kilogram.”
“Methanol is made one of three ways,” says Meaney. “Traditionally it’s made from fossil fuels. That’s not what we’re using. We’re using biogenic renewable methanol for this race, so it’s rated by the ISCC RED II initiative as carbon neutral. The other critical aspect of it is that our process emits no NOx, no SOx, and no particulates. If you were to combust this methanol, you might have a small amount. If you combust natural gas or ammonia, you’d have a significant amount of NOx and particulate matter that you’d have to deal with. By not having localized emissions and having a carbon neutral global emission, we can achieve the sustainability goals set forth by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.”
“The third way of producing methanol uses green energy from renewable assets and electrolysis-based systems to produce green hydrogen,” says Meaney. “With the biogenic CO2 in our methanol, we take a negative one plus one equals zero approach. We extract CO2 from the atmosphere or from a biogenic source, like municipal solid waste that’s giving off methane to the atmosphere that would be significantly worse. You source that CO2, which makes it carbon negative, attach it to the hydrogen molecule to make methanol, and then release it at a later point to be carbon neutral.”
“We can’t hide from the fact we give off CO2, unlike some other fuels,” confesses Meaney. “But the CO2 from a tailpipe is going to affect the world. There’s no doubt that the CO2 from the fossil fuel power plant that provides electricity 100 miles away is going to affect the world. We’re not going to hide from the fact that there are CO2 emissions. In fact, it makes us more accountable to sustainability goals.”
“I won’t say our solution is the be all and end all for every market,” says Meaney. “Every market has a different application. Green ammonia may be great to displace LNG and large-scale power production. But to replace diesel or HVO in the future, where you need to reduce localized emissions, a safer liquid rather than a gas is more needed. So that’s why methanol provides that advantage as a distributed energy source.”
Even if Extreme E becomes Extreme H and switches to hydrogen-powered racing vehicles, Kaizen will still be involved to provide site power, although delivering hydrogen to the vehicles themselves would be more problematic. “Either way, the site needs power,” says Meaney. “The benefit of our system is we use low temperature Proton Exchange Membrane fuel cells in our design. It’s the same type of fuel cell that will be in the Extreme H cars. If there is an opportunity where we’re able to compress the hydrogen out of our reformer into a vehicle, that’s always a good option as then you would have one fuel supply.”
However, because the hydrogen used in vehicle fuel cells must be delivered at 10,000 PSI (700 bar) to reduce space, it would have to be compressed onsite. “We’re storing it at 20 PSI,” says Meaney. “This is a big difference for safety. It’s not going to blow up in any kind of way. There’s always a risk with hydrogen and a risk with batteries. There’s risk with diesel and gasoline. But we’ve built in safety features around National Fire Protection Agency guidelines for constant ventilation, fire protection, and monitoring to make sure that we’re safe.” Methanol is also quite safe. “It has a vapor pressure that needs to be maintained, so we’ve designed our storage tank to use a top feed, as well as having proper vapor controls in order to protect us on site. We store the methanol a safe distance from the reforming process so that we’re not actually in a combustible zone within the same areas to methanol.”
Kaizen is showcasing its technology with Extreme, but the company is also building out its commercial charger market. Where the grid isn’t yet available for the installation of high-powered chargers for commercial and domestic use, Kaizen’s technology can provide the necessary boost in a clean way. Meaney says: “When a customer needs to be first to market to capture the EV charging business, but they’re waiting years for the grid, we can provide a solution in four to six months that will allow them to circumvent the grid and get power to their customers sooner. And lock in those contracts.”
This is a temporary solution that will tide them over until the grid connection is available. But it will also speed up the EV transition and help deal with concerns when renewable sources such as wind and solar aren’t entirely reliable. “Everyone’s really worried about intermittent renewable energy,” says Meaney. “You want that to be your main source, but you also want power you can just turn on when you need it. We make it possible to have this off-grid without diesel generators.”
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