Hydrogen is the clean secondary energy source, but energy conversion is always leads to losses. Thus development of hydrogen energy technologies has to be concerned on increasing of overall efficiency of primary energy sources usage: from hydrogen production to end product which is electricity. Performance of hydrogen power units are higher than performance of conventional fuels and for variety of perspective stationary power systems is reasonable to use hydrogen, especially for energy accumulation and load management. Energy recovery coefficient for these systems can reach up to 50-60% with moderate equipment costs.
Analysis of energy efficiency of different technologies shows that for power level lower than 1 MW the most efficient technology are fuel cells and for higher power levels hydrogen combustion turbo- and hybrid systems are preferable.
In Laboratory for Hydrogen Energy Technologies of Joint Institute for High Temperatures in cooperation with Chemical Automatics Design Bureau and Keldysh Center the key part of hydrogen combustion technology is created – hydrogen steam generators for autonomous steam turbine units, for upgrade or newly built power stations. We present results of process investigations and fire tests of experimental 25 MW and 100 kW H2/O2 steam generators.