Hydrogen start-up Sunfire collects 109 million euros

Sunfire

The Dresden high-tech company wants to continue growing and be at the forefront in the booming hydrogen market.

(Photo: dpa)

Dusseldorf The hydrogen start-up Sunfire from Dresden has big plans: the first factory in Germany with a capacity of 500 megawatts should be in place as early as 2023. An expansion to one gigawatt per year is also already being planned. The 109 million euros that Sunfire has now collected from a consortium should move the plans a good bit further.

“We will use the money to transfer our two electrolysis technologies to an industrial scale and set up the first gigafactories,” said Sunfire boss Nils Aldag on Monday. The financiers include investors Lightrock, Planet First Partners (PFP) and Carbon Direct Capital Management.

So-called Power-to-X technology (PtX) is an important building block for a successful energy transition. It is expected that electrolysis capacities in the European Union will increase to 40,000 megawatts from the current 1,000 megawatts by 2030. Above all, this requires the expansion of renewable energies such as wind and sun, from which green hydrogen can then be produced.

In the electricity-based electrolysis process, water is broken down into its components oxygen and hydrogen with the help of electricity. The hydrogen can then either be used directly or stored. But it can also be converted back into electricity or processed into gas and synthetic fuel (e-fuels). If green electricity is used for the electrolysis, the end product is correspondingly green.

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Experts see the benefits of green hydrogen in the aviation and shipping industries, but also in large parts of industry – for example in the chemical or steel industries, where hydrogen is still produced exclusively from fossil energy sources. Just on Monday, the steel giant Thyssen-Krupp announced that it would once again accelerate the production of its hydrogen systems. The green alternative is to replace coking coal in the firing of energy-intensive blast furnaces in ten years.

Competitors have big plans too

In 2010, Sunfire developed its own technology that is particularly suitable for use in steelworks or refineries – so-called SOEC-based high-temperature electrolysis, in which hot water vapor is used. This is generated in many factories as industrial waste heat, which has so far mostly not been used. With the takeover of the Swiss electrolysis system manufacturer IHT Industrie Haute, Sunfire also brought so-called alkaline electrolysis technology into the company at the beginning of the year. The technology is considered mature, relatively inexpensive and flexible.

Alongside Thyssen-Krupp and Siemens, Sunfire has been the third major provider of hydrogen technology in Germany since the takeover. The shareholders of Sunfire include the French energy giant Total and the Finnish Neste group. With the system manufacturer SMS from Düsseldorf, the Dresden-based company has a strategic investor on board who can also help with the construction of the electrolysis systems.

But the competition also has big plans: Nel from Norway, ITM from Great Britain and McPhy from France raised hundreds of millions of euros in capital last year and are planning the first electrolysis factories in the gigabyte range.

More: Solar start-up Enpal becomes the first green unicorn in Germany

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