The Critical Role of Power Conversion in the Hydrogen Economy

What it means for hiring

An electrolyser stack runs at one to four volts a cell and a few hundred volts in total, and it draws thousands to tens of thousands of amps of DC. For decades that current came from 12-pulse diode and thyristor rectifiers of the kind heavy electrochemical plants have always used. Power Electronics News sets out what is replacing them. Prodrive's Hydra does the job with SiC MOSFETs at 6 MW a unit, scalable to 24 MW, with a claimed 98.7 percent peak efficiency and current distortion under one percent. KraftPowercon has a 5 MW rectifier on the Jeju Island hydrogen project.

Swapping a thyristor bridge for a SiC active front end changes who designs it. The old rectifier was an industrial product built by engineers who knew transformers, magnetics and grid codes. A megawatt SiC converter needs people who have done fast switching at high power: gate drive, busbar layout, thermal design, and control good enough to meet IEEE 519 at the connection point. Those people work in solar central inverters, battery storage and traction today, and an electrolyser maker competes with all three for them. Hydrogen can offer power levels most of them will never see anywhere else. What it has to overcome is a run of delayed and cancelled projects that has taught engineers to ask whether the programme will exist in two years. A hiring manager who can show funded capacity and a real converter roadmap gets a hearing a generic hydrogen advert does not.

Read the original at Power Electronics News .