I'm here at Nottingham University to look at this really quite revolutionary hydrogen
refueller and drive this revolutionary hydrogen car by Hyundai. It's a marriage of these two
really significant things. You'll be able to lease this car soon. Ordinary people can
lease a hydrogen SUV and you will be able to come and fill up in hydrogen refuellers
like this all over the country. That is the beatific vision. That's why I'm here and it's
not that far away.
Well, what we've got today is that ITM Power are starting their EcoIsland project and we're
collaborating with them. The EcoIsland project - ITM Power are looking to develop a hydrogen
refueller, which is four times the size of the Nottingham refueller, which you can see
behind me. The refueller is a very exciting development because we're actually going to
be taking green electricity that we are generating from PV panels on the roof of our new Energy
Technologies Building, and we're using that green electricity to generate hydrogen on
site. And so we've got sustainable hydrogen that's producing no carbon emissions and then
we're going to use that hydrogen within vehicles. So we're going to have a small fleet of hydrogen
vehicles on the University. And we can also use the hydrogen within our R&D labs, part
of the Energy Technologies Building, where we're looking to investigate things like Smart
Grid Communities.
Driving this hydrogen SUV, it's just completely conventional, absolutely. You just put it
into drive, and push the throttle down, and off she goes. She does it in complete silence,
but it takes literally the same time to fill it as it does a petrol car. So there's no
compromise there. You've got 300 odd miles range, so again the same as a petrol car.
But it's smooth, it's fast, it's quick, and it's eerily quiet and exciting. So anybody
who thinks this is a bad thing, that this is a change that we don't want, it really
is the most exciting thing to happen to the car for maybe a hundred years.
So the research that we've been doing on hydrogen is, we've been looking at solid state storage
of hydrogen because this is the most compact way of storing hydrogen. With the Hyundai
vehicle that you can see behind me, then that uses 700 bar of tank. So there's two issues.
Number one it's a very high pressure. Number two it is a very large tank. You're probably
looking at a 250 litre tank. What we're wanting to do is investigate technologies that will
reduce the size of that tank, to get it down towards about a hundred litres in size. And
the way that you can do that is actually storing the hydrogen, not as a gas, but as a solid.
And so we are investigating a number of materials that act like a sponge, take the hydrogen
from gas into the solid-state and it holds onto the hydrogen at lower pressures as well.
So instead of having to have the tank to operate at 700 bar, our solid-state tanks might only
operate at 10 bar.
Nottingham is a world leader in hydrogen technology and that's great. And we need to push it,
it's absolutely essential. Because in these fiscally constrained times, it would be so
easy for all this stuff to fall off the page. And then in 10 years we're gonna say, "What
a shame we didn't do that". So this is really, really important and blokes like me have a
moral obligation to come here and say this is where it all is, world-leading hydrogen
research and development centre. We need to give it all the energy, all the resources
we can, so that our kids don't have to be chained to the fossil fuel monster. So we
can develop the infrastructure, we can develop the cars, and we can have cheap, clean fuel.
That's what it's all about. This is the future being cast here at Nottingham University.