We are in the midst of the Third Industrial Revolution and one of the pillars of this movement involves the rollout of green energy smart grids. There are wind turbines popping up all over the country, on land and in the ocean. We are seeing industrial scale solar farms to supplement smaller distributed power from residential panels. And some homes have battery storage, which helps during “events” when the grid needs extra power. But if we are to fully make the leap to a functional green energy smart grid, there will need to be multiple megawatt hydrogen storage (PEM) and this fact was made perfectly clear by looking at what happened to Texas recently. They had some wind turbines for green energy supply, but the grid itself is antiquated and closed off to neighboring regions; thus there was no real redundancy to protect from massive blackouts. When regional micro-grids are contained within a larger smart grid, you have safety nets if they include large scale energy storage to deal with the inevitable weather related power outages. And currently there is only one company that can handle MW PEM storage: Cummins (CMI) because they bought out Hydrogenics in 2019. Add a soon-to-be approved $2T infrastructure bill… and suddenly major tailwinds are about to blow.
Thomas Linebarger, Chairman and CEO of Cummins, at the Feb 4th Earnings Call:
- “I’d like to take a moment to provide an update on the progress we made in New Power in 2020. First, we delivered a 20-megawatt PEM electrolyzer system to generate green hydrogen in Bécancour, Québec, making it the largest operation of its kind in the world. The Cummins electrolyzer system is installed in an Air Liquide hydrogen production facility and began commercial operation late last year.”
“I believe that water will one day be employed as fuel, that hydrogen and oxygen which constitute it, used singly or together, will furnish an inexhaustible source of heat and light, of an intensity of which coal is not capable.” -Jules Verne (1828-1905)