Perovskites in a Circular Economy, Clean Hydrogen From Offshore Wind, and Hydrogen Transportation Infrastructure Modeling

In this episode, our hosts discuss:

1. Revolutionizing Solar Energy with Perovskites
As we develop technology to produce renewable energy, it’s important that our materials don’t cause problems for future generations! Discover how NREL researchers are advancing perovskite solar technology, which promises a leap forward in solar energy efficiency. These emerging materials could lead to high-performance solar panels that are designed with recycling in mind, supporting a circular economy. 

2. Harnessing Offshore Wind for Clean Hydrogen Production
Learn about NREL’s innovative approach to producing clean hydrogen: using electricity from offshore wind turbines to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. This technique, primarily feasible along the US Atlantic Coast and Gulf of Mexico, could lead to more cost-effective hydrogen production. Listen in to explore the technological and economic aspects of this method, including case studies and future research directions.

3. Optimizing Hydrogen Infrastructure with SERA
Explore how the Scenario Evaluation and Regionalization Analysis (SERA) model is being used to strategize and optimize hydrogen infrastructure deployment. This flexible tool helps assess cost-effective pathways for building out hydrogen supply chains and can even model scenarios for other fuels and carbon capture.

Stay tuned for more insights into the latest advancements in clean energy research. Follow us for updates and join us in two weeks for the next episode!

This episode was hosted by Kerrin Jeromin and Taylor Mankle, written and produced by Allison Montroy and Kaitlyn Stottler, and edited by James Wilcox, Joe DelNero, and Brittany Falch. Graphics are by Brittnee Gayet. Our title music is written and performed by Ted Vaca and episode music by Chuck Kurnik, Jim Riley, and Mark Sanseverino of Drift BC. Transforming Energy: The NREL Podcast is created by the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado. We express our gratitude and acknowledge that the land we are on is the traditional and ancestral homelands of the Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Ute peoples. Email us at podcast@nrel.gov. Follow NREL on X, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, Threads, and Facebook.

Transcript

Kerrin: Welcome to Transforming Energy: The NREL Podcast, brought to you by the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory. We’re highlighting the latest in clean energy research and innovations happening at the lab. It’s Wednesday, August 7th. I’m your co-host, Kerrin Jeromin.  

Taylor: And I’m Taylor Mankle.   

Kerrin: Hey Taylor. Great to see you. It’s time to get serious. About science. 

Taylor: Always

Kerrin: Because today’s episode is jam-packed with lots of tech, lots of new research, and lots of clean energy, of course.  

Taylor: Kerrin, I. Am. Ready. We’ve got perovskites, we’ve got offshore wind, we’ve got hydrogen, we’ve got transportation. Let’s science!  

Kerrin: Let’s science! My favorite kickstart… 

[music]   

Taylor: So, a big conversation when talking about renewable energy expansion is the question of what happens after materials reach the end of their life.  

Kerrin: Right, we’re thinking of how to solve the climate crisis in the immediate future, but it’s just as important to make sure we’re minimizing our impact on the environment decades down the road. In solving today’s problems, we don’t want to create more problems for future generations.  

Taylor: Part of that conversation focuses on solar panels—and at NREL, researchers are thinking ahead on how to scale, deploy, and design future solar panels to be easily recyclable.  

Kerrin: These researchers are working at the forefront of an emerging photovoltaic technology called perovskites—which may eventually unlock the next level of high-efficiency photovoltaics and play an important role in our global decarbonization efforts and cutting greenhouse gas emissions.  

Taylor: Because this tech is in its early stages, researchers have the ability to design it better and think about its impact—before it’s out in the world.  

Kerrin: We’ve talked about the concept of a circular economy before. In this case it’s designing photovoltaics for remanufacturing and recycling—and perovskite photovoltaics has the potential to be among the most sustainable energy sources on the market, if we make sure that they are manufactured, used, and recycled sustainably.  

Taylor: The most efficient circular economy begins at the design stage and considers materials sourcing, strategizes for a long product lifetime, and plans end-of-life management. 

Kerrin: Exactly. So right now we most commonly see solar panels either made from silicon or cadmium telluride. And while silicon solar panels have enormous environment and climate benefits, the truth is they just weren’t designed for a circular economy—meaning there’s no ideal way to recycle or reuse the. 

Taylor: Meanwhile, cadmium telluride solar panels have had an established recycling program from the technology’s inception partly to address the scarcity of the chemical element, telluride. Ultimately, all forms of tech manufacturing come with environmental costs, such as recycling challenges and the use of potentially toxic chemicals.  

Kerrin: But NREL’s researchers are saying that because perovskites are at a turning point, we can address those concerns now.  Which is awesome.

Taylor: They identified some sustainable swaps for perovskites, like diluting lead with other chemically similar metals such as tin. Or replacing expensive previous metals like silver and gold with lower cost alternatives like aluminum, copper, or nickel.  

Kerrin: And of course, there’s circularity. Remanufacturing, for example, comes into play when an old solar panel module is disassembled with the goal of using certain parts to make a new module.  

Taylor: Recycling, meanwhile, calls for the conversion of waste materials into raw materials that can then be refined and reused. Like for the specialized glass on the solar panels--establishing a recycling pathway for the glass will become more critical as PV deployment grows, because glass manufacturing as it stands today requires raw materials and is an energy-intensive process. 

Kerrin: It all reminds me of that Beatles song…Here comes the sun … --powered, highly efficient, circular economy perovskite photovoltaic systems! Do do do do.  

Taylor: Just like Paul and John wrote it, Kerrin

[music]  

Kerrin: So here’s a mind bender for you: we’re looking at using wind to turn water into hydrogen. It might take us all a minute to process this one… 

Taylor: Let’s break it down ... first how? By using electricity generated by offshore wind turbines to split water and produce clean hydrogen. 

Kerrin: Brillant. Okay, so where is this happening? The economics work best mainly along the US Atlantic Coast and the Gulf of Mexico, in regions where the water is not as deep and the wind can be very strong.  

Taylor: And finally the ever important why? Well, NREL researchers think it might make economic sense for producing low-cost clean hydrogen.  

Kerrin: So, clean hydrogen. Let’s take a step back to talk about it. Recall back to science class, water is H-2-O, meaning two parts hydrogen and one part Oxygen. So, when we use an electrolyzer to electrically split water into its component parts, we get hydrogen as one element. And hydrogen is a versatile energy carrier—it's a way to store and move the energy produced by offshore wind.  

Taylor: If we power the electrolyzer with a renewable energy source, like offshore wind, we get clean hydrogen. And that clean hydrogen can be used across a variety of sectors like for power generation, transportation fuels, chemical and industrial processes, and other applications. The U.S. Department of Energy has a goal to reduce the cost of clean hydrogen from $5 per kilogram today, to $1 per kilogram by 2031. Even at $2 per kilogram, clean hydrogen could be cost-competitive against more carbon-intensive methods of hydrogen production.  

Kerrin: Very good. But the ability to do this depends on the tech used and the location of the hydrogen production, which is why NREL researchers wanted to look into it as one part of the lab’s large research portfolio on clean hydrogen and its integration with renewable energy technologies.  

Taylor: They used case study simulations to analyze the economic performance of producing hydrogen from offshore wind energy in 2025, 2030, and 2035.  

Kerrin: The researchers looked at two possible scenarios. The first one was a little more conventional: an offshore wind plant generated electricity that was transmitted by high-voltage cables to an onshore site. There, an electrolyzer used electricity to produce hydrogen from freshwater.  

Taylor: In the second scenario, the hydrogen was split from desalinated (or salt-removed) seawater at the offshore wind plant site, requiring more infrastructure in the ocean to accommodate the additional equipment. The hydrogen was then transported via pipelines to shore for storage. But there’s still a lot to learn about this process and its feasibility. 

Kerrin: Right. Offshore renewable hydrogen production is still uncharted territory. It will take innovating and rethinking the system setup to be able to integrate all the necessary equipment with a wind farm for large-scale operations. 

Taylor: Ultimately, this study showed promising indicators of what large-scale deployment of offshore wind-to-hydrogen could look like.  

Kerrin: It’s an area NREL is closely watching as new and better technologies continue to be developed. 

[music]  

Kerrin: So, we talked about a promising method for clean hydrogen production, but what about how it gets used in transportation?  

Taylor: Let’s talk about it! The use of clean hydrogen and fuel cells for transportation applications—particularly for medium- and heavy-duty vehicles like buses or trucks—is one of the key solutions to decarbonize U.S. transportation. 

Kerrin: But to achieve its full potential as a transportation fuel, we need to successfully build out hydrogen fueling infrastructure on a scale large enough to support the demand for fuel.  

Taylor: OK, so here’s a big question researchers are asking: “What is the lowest-cost hydrogen infrastructure deployment strategy to support demand?” 

Kerrin: Great question, and a very researcher sounding question, and to answer that, NREL has developed the Scenario Evaluation and Regionalization Analysis model. And you know there’s an acronym there. It’s called SERA for short.  

Taylor: SERA is a flexible optimization tool. The user can define demand, available supply locations, technologies and distribution pathways, input prices, and cost and performance parameters—and then the model uses that information to optimize infrastructure buildout, most commonly by minimizing costs.  

Kerrin: It’s one part of a bunch of the Department of Energy's Hydrogen Program's strategic analysis activities to assess the needs, scenarios, and challenges associated with the rollout of hydrogen applications. Which, again, is essential for decarbonizing the country’s transportation sector.  

Taylor: SERA has been used to design hydrogen supply chain infrastructure to support the growing hydrogen market--like looking at the cost of adopting alternative vehicles, which hydrogen production technologies are needed, and how they are built out to minimize costs. 

Kerrin: It can be used in a lot of ways and for a lot of different needs, including for academic institutions and corporations—in fact in 2023, the University of California Davis used SERA in a project to plan the implementation of hydrogen systems in California. 

Taylor: And it’s not just for hydrogen. The SERA model can be used for any fuel or material—even carbon dioxide. SERA can even model the most cost-efficient pathways to capture and store carbon.  

Kerrin: So cool—and so very unique!  

[music]  

Taylor: Whew – this episode got real technical. But we hope you stuck with it—I know I sure learned a lot!  

Kerrin: Me too! And these topics we talked about today were all crosscutting. Meaning we didn’t just talk about solar, but also manufacturing. And we didn’t just talk about offshore wind, but how it can create hydrogen. And we didn’t just talk about transportation, but we also looked at hydrogen systems analysis.  

Taylor: These stories really highlight that all the research happening at NREL is ultimately connected. And in order to successfully create a clean energy future, we have to do it together. 

Kerrin: I love it. Folks, thanks for joining us today, as always please give us a follow and a review, and we will be back in two weeks with more news from the lab!  

Taylor: See you next time!  

[music]  

Kerrin: This episode was adapted from NREL news articles from June 2024 written by Natasha Headland and Wayne Hicks. Our theme music is written and performed by Ted Vaca and episode music by Chuck Kurnik, Jim Riley, and Mark Sanseverino, of Drift B-C. This podcast is produced by NREL’s Communications Office and recorded at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado. We express our gratitude and acknowledge that the land we are on is the traditional and ancestral homelands of the Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Ute peoples. We recognize and pay respect to the Indigenous peoples from our past, present, and future, and are grateful to those who have been and continue to be stewards of this land.