...Amazon has a profitablecloud-computing businessthat can help shelter it from trouble in its retail divisions, but that’s only half the story. The company’s growing emphasis on third-party selling, a very different business model than the big-box stores’, has helped lift the tech giant while competitors are forced to offer big discounts.
While Amazon does sell some items directly, the company is predominantly an online marketplace like EBay Inc., meaning it collects commissions and fees when shoppers purchase things on the site without having to actually buy that inventory. In the three months ended June 30, 57% of all things sold on Amazon came from independent merchants who bear all the inventory risk—the highest that number has ever been.
A Plug Power Inc. electrolyzer stack at the company’s Concord, Massachusetts, facility. Electrolyzers, which use electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, are a building block of a green hydrogen economy.Photographer: Adam Glanzman/Bloomberg
Solar power depends on the solar cell. Wind power, the wind turbine.
The key to the green hydrogen economy is a little-known machine with a name out of 1950s sci-fi — the electrolyzer. And after a century of obscurity, the electrolyzer’s moment has come.
The device uses electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. If that electricity comes from wind turbines, solar panels or a nuclear reactor, the whole process gives off no greenhouse gases. Factories, power plants, even jet aircraft can then burn that hydrogen without warming the earth.
A Plug Power employee inspects a stack in Concord, Massachusetts. Stacks are the core of an electrolyzer, where the reaction takes place. Multiple stacks can be combined in a single unit, depending on how much hydrogen a customer needs.
Photographer: Adam Glanzman/Bloomberg
There are other ways to make hydrogen fuel, from natural gas or even coal. But the ways to do it carbon-free, with no emissions that need to be trapped and stored, rely on the electrolyzer.
“I don’t think people grasp what an electrolyzer is,” said Andy Marsh, chief executive officer of Plug Power Inc., which makes the devices. “It is the building block of green hydrogen.”
Unlike wind turbines and solar cells, electrolyzers aren’t immediately easy to understand. Larger ones can look like a jumble of tubes and pipes, while smaller, more modular versions are collections of electronics and machinery crammed into boxes the size of a shipping container or even a fridge.
All electrolyzer stacks contain oppositely charged electrodes — cathodes and anodes — as well as an electrolyte. The Plug Power electrolyzer stacks shown here use a technology called “proton exchange membrane” or PEM, which features a solid electrolyte.
Photographer: Adam Glanzman/Bloomberg
Scientists discovered the process the electrolyzer employs — electrolysis — more than two centuries ago, and commercial electrolyzers hit the market in the 1920s. They were the main way to produce hydrogen until the 1960s, when a process using steam to strip hydrogen from natural gas supplanted them. Almost all of the hydrogen used around the globe today — in oil refineries, fertilizer plants and chemical facilities — comes from natural gas. Demand for electrolyzers dried up.
That has now changed — in just the last few years. Measured by the amount of power the machines consume, worldwide electrolyzer sales doubled from 200 megawatts in 2020 to 458 in 2021, according to BloombergNEF, a clean energy research group. They’re expected to triple this year, reaching anywhere from 1,839 megawatts to 2,464 megawatts, BNEF predicts. It may be the kind of hockey-stick moment solar power experienced a decade ago.
The Electrolyzer's Hockey-Stick Moment
Electrolyzer sales are expected to triple this year, under BNEF's most conservative estimate
Source: BloombergNEF
“It’s going to be difficult to supply all the demand,” said Amy Adams, vice president of fuel cell and hydrogen technologies at Cummins Inc., a veteran engine maker that has jumped into the business. “Can everybody scale up the supply base as fast as people would like?”
Even more explosive growth likely lies ahead. Electrolyzer “gigafactories,” each able to make enough electrolyzers in one year to use at least 1,000 megawatts of power, have been announced in Australia, China, India and Spain.
“When somebody says they’re going to build a gigafactory, they’re talking about in a year having more capacity than is installed in the world today,” said Patrick Molloy, a manager in the climate aligned industries program at the US-based RMI energy and climate think tank.
These electrolyzer stacks, made by Cummins Inc., use “alkaline” technology, which features a liquid electrolyte. Alkaline electrolyzers contain fewer rare metals than PEM units and tend to cost less.
Photographer: Source: Cummins Inc.
The amount of hydrogen each megawatt of electricity can produce varies, making comparisons between products and projects difficult. The most popular electrolyzer technology needs between 51 and 54-kilowatt hours of electricity, on average, to produce one kilogram of hydrogen, according to BNEF.
The underlying idea may be old, but there’s plenty of innovation. Electrolyzers come in three basic flavors — alkaline, proton-exchange membrane (PEM), and solid oxide — with different pros and cons. All involve water reacting with oppositely charged electrodes and an electrolyte, sometimes liquid, sometimes solid. Competitors are vying to perfect each technology. They’re paring down the use of such expensive catalysts as iridium and figuring out better ways to build a product that, until now, was largely assembled by hand.
Plug Power has smaller stacks used for testing new materials at high temperatures and pressures.
Photographer: Adam Glanzman/Bloomberg
Driving all of this is the need for a clean, carbon-free fuel. Solar and wind power now cost less than new fossil fuel generation in much of the world, but storing that electricity in bulk remains difficult and expensive. And some things, like steel mills and jet planes, can’t easily run on electricity. A molecule that can be produced, stored, shipped and used without pumping heat-trapping carbon into the atmosphere would work far better. Governments and companies worldwide are betting hydrogen will be that molecule.
“You need long-term energy storage, and you need it transported place to place,” said KR Sridhar, chief executive officer of Bloom Energy Corp. a veteran cleantech company now diving into the electrolyzer market. Large-scale batteries, he said, only provide energy for a few hours and aren’t portable. “You will not charge a big battery in Australia, ship it to Japan, discharge it and ship it back to Australia,” Sridhar said.
Hydrogen is the most common element in the universe. But here on Earth, it's typically bound together with oxygen, nitrogen, carbon or other elements. To use hydrogen as a fuel, it must be cleaved off of those compounds. That can be done in a dizzying array of ways, each represented by a specific shade on a constantly expanding color wheel. The dominant form of hydrogen today, pulled from natural gas, is “gray hydrogen.” Capture the CO₂ from that process, and it’s called “blue.” Strip the hydrogen from water using renewable power and an electrolyzer, and you get “green hydrogen.” Plug the electrolyzer into a nuclear plant, and it’s “pink.” Green hydrogen now costs far more thangray or blue: as much as $9.62 for a kilogram of green hydrogen, compared to $2.72 for blue, according to BNEF. But that likely won’t last. BNEF predicts that by 2030, green hydrogen will be cheaper than blue in every country the analysis service tracks.
Plug Power’s “Merrimack” stack was based on an electrolyzer technology used to provide oxygen aboard submarines.
Photographer: Adam Glanzman/Bloomberg
For many hydrogen advocates, the electrolyzer is the missing piece to fulfill renewable power’s promise. It can take the excess electricity streaming from solar plants at noon and turn it into a fuel for use any time.
“That’s one of the things about electricity — we as consumers want it when we want it, and renewables don’t always work that way,” said Ian Russell, Bloom Energy’s director of development engineering.
Two of Bloom’s electrolyzers perch behind a low industrial building in Fremont, California, just up the freeway from Tesla Inc.’s original auto plant. Seven feet tall, their smooth, rounded covers pop out and up to reveal a mass of circuit boards, red and orange wiring, and a metal core that holds the “hot box” where water vapor separates into hydrogen and oxygen. The core runs between 750 and 800 degrees Celsius — a scorching 1,472 degrees Fahrenheit — but touch its exterior, and it feels warm. The only sound is the whir from a row of fans at top.
Bloom built its business on fuel cells, devices that generate electricity through an electrochemical reaction rather than combustion. Now the San Jose company is selling solid-oxide electrolyzers using most of the same technology, but in reverse. Hydrogen fuel cells combine hydrogen and oxygen into water as they produce power — electrolyzers do the opposite. They’re almost mirror images of each other.
“We’re building on our track record of fuel cells,” Russell said. “The manufacturing technologies, the field service program we have in place, the global supply chain — we already know how to do this.”
Plug Power also started with fuel cells before adding electrolyzers, and several competitors sell both. Cummins in 2019 spent $290 million to buy Hydrogenics Corp. for its fuel cells, thinking they could help decarbonize Cummins’s customers in mining and heavy transportation. But Hydrogenics had also developed electrolyzers, and now those look like the better business, said Managing Director Alex Savelli.
“We came to realize the electrolyzer opportunity is probably as big if not bigger, and probably will happen sooner, than the fuel cell,” he said. “Sometimes, it’s OK to get lucky.”
A Cummins PEM stack. PEM and alkaline electrolyzers – along with a third type called “solid oxide” — have different selling points. But so far, alkaline electrolyzers dominate global sales.
Photographer: Source: Cummins Inc.
Each type of electrolyzer has its selling points. Alkaline electrolyzers, for example, tend to be the least expensive and have become the technology of choice for Chinese manufacturers. They’re trying to undercut their global competitors on price — just as happened with solar cells a decade ago — and BNEF reports that Chinese alkaline electrolyzers currently cost 73% less than comparable units made in the West. PEM technology uses more rare metals and costs more, but it can start faster than alkaline, something worth considering if the power source is as variable as the sun and the wind.
Hydrogen has become a priority for the Chinese government, and electrolyzers are a big part of the push. Electrolyzer deliveries there may top 1,600 megawatts this year, mostly on orders from state-owned businesses such as oil and gas giants Sinopec and CNPC, as well as high-emitting companies like coal-based chemical company Ningxia Baofeng Energy Group. If anything, demand is rising faster than production. And the companies making the machines — including one of the world’s largest solar manufacturers, Longi Green Energy — don’t want to limit themselves to the Chinese market.
The top of a Plug Power “Allagash” stack. Up to 10 of the stacks can be included in a single unit, producing 4.5 tons of hydrogen per day, according to the company.
Photographer: Adam Glanzman/Bloomberg
“It’s quite difficult to order electrolyzers now,” said Mao Zongqiang, a professor at the Institute of Nuclear and New Energy Technology at Tsinghua University in Beijing. “The supply can’t meet the demand.”
The customers could, in the end, span many industries. Oil companies need hydrogen for their refineries, where it helps lower the sulfur content of fuel, although many have their own way of producing it from their own natural gas. But semiconductor and LED factories use hydrogen, too, and could benefit from on-site production. Electrolyzers would provide that. Owners of solar plants and wind farms may want to add electrolyzers, just as they’re adding batteries to their projects today.
“We’re just at the beginning of where this industry’s going,” said Ole Hoefelmann, general manager of Plug Power’s electrolyzer business.
On the Management of Houses — the World According to Alice de Rothschild
A new exhibition at Waddesdon Manor — a grand English Rothschild estate turned house museum — portrays "Miss Alice," as she was known, in an entirely new light.
JULY 17, 2022The cranky, know-it-all spinster is a stock figure in the stories of many families — including the Rothschilds. Among members of the English branch of that famous international banking family, Alice de Rothschild (1847–1922) has long been cast in that role.
For decades, any mention of “Miss Alice,” however affectionate, came with a roll of the eyes. Famously persnickety, she had firm ideas about how things should be done — and she did not keep them to herself. According to family legend, when King Edward VII paid her a visit, she asked him to remove his hands from her silk upholstery.
Happily, the new exhibition “Alice’s Wonderlands” replaces the caricature of Miss Alice with a finely observed portrait that shows us who she really was, what she achieved and why that matters. Housed at Waddesdon Manor, the grand Rothschild estate turned house museum, 90 minutes from London — the very place where she scolded the king — the show is as delightful as it is enlightening.
She was fearless, too. In her time, it was a given that only a man could run a large estate. Well, she owned and managed three — and simultaneously, too.
The exhibition’s whirlwind tour of the three wonderlands introduces us to the imposing, Frenchified faux château Waddesdon Manor and the pink English fairyland pavilion at Eythrope, just next door, which together encompass 5,000 acres. We also take a trip to Grasse, France, where Villa Victoria stood on a mere 350 acres of mountainside, a Tyrolean homage to the Austrian branch of the Rothschilds into which she was born.
Today, Villa Victoria no longer exists, and Eythrope’s pavilion has been significantly altered. But Waddesdon survives much as it was, and it is open to the public. The setting and subject of “Alice’s Wonderlands” thus feel like a perfect fit — even if the manor is the only one of the three wonderlands that Alice did not create entirely herself.
Her brother Ferdinand (1839–98) completed the house in 1883, but she was in charge from the start. (Tragically, in 1866, Ferdinand’s wife, Evelina, died during childbirth, as did their just-born child. He never remarried.) Ferdinand left Waddesdon’s management to his sister because he knew that she would look after it better than anyone else. And indeed she did. As Mia Jackson, the manor’s curator of decorative arts and curator of the show, observes, without Alice “Waddesdon would not have survived.”
Conceived by Ferdinand and realized by the fashionable French architect Hippolyte Destailleur, the wildly and marvelously improbable Waddesdon looks like a turreted FRENCH RENAISSANCE castle that woke up one morning to find itself set in lush English woodlands. Ferdinand decorated its main floor in the highest 18th-century French style: JEAN HENRI RIESENER FUNITURE, tapestries from GOBELINS and Beauvais, Parisian wood paneling for the walls, plus all those pieces of Sèvres porcelain and Savonnerie carpets.
When, after Ferdinand’s death, she became Waddesdon’s owner, Alice kept that floor much as it was. Upstairs, however, necessity and taste led to changes.
She replaced Ferdinand’s SPORTING PAINTINGS, which hung in the long corridor of the Bachelors’ Wing, with an imaginative wall display of her ARMOR holdings — an usual collecting area for a woman then as now.
As chatelaine, Alice also made herself a luxurious sitting room upstairs, which has been re-created for the show using newly discovered color photographs she commissioned around 1910. The images themselves are exhibited, and thanks to her expert attention to preservation, a good many of the room’s contents survive in first-rate condition, not least a Riesener chest of drawers and that carpet commissioned for the Louvre.
Elsewhere in the show, a long corridor from Eythrope has been re-created. Near the top of its longest uninterrupted wall hangs a series of RENAISSANCE PORTRAITS. All have curved backs that appear to curl onto the ceiling, enabling the sitters to look down and say hello to us.
Another display from Eythrope conveys Alice’s delight in the eclectic presentation of art. Refined RENAISSANCE MAJOLICA hangs next to homely EARLY ENGLISH EARTHENWARE. Each seems enlivened by the company it is keeping.
The exhibition’s Family Room gives visitors a chance to do a little genteel snooping, presenting letters, estate books, personal photos, Miss Alice’s garden book and detailed notes for house staff. Here, we come to truly appreciate how the pursuit of excellence guided all aspects of her choices as an estate manager.
In 1906, she wrote to George Johnson, Waddesdon’s head gardener, to remind him that “[q]uality is the one thing you must study in all your work.” Recognizing quality remains as important now, 100 years after her death, as it was then.
Alice de Rothschild left her English estates to her nephew James, who was from the French branch of the family. His wife, Dorothy, was English, and eventually they settled in her home country. The new owners learned the ropes by watching Alice’s well-trained employees carry out their jobs.
The couple were childless, however, and when James died, in 1957, he left Waddesdon to the National Trust — along with the biggest endowment in the charity’s history to secure its future.
Today, the family connection continues: James’s grandnephew Jacob (now Lord Rothschild) owns Eythrope and brilliantly manages Waddesdon, with the Rothschild Foundation covering much of its running costs.
As the exhibition makes amply clear, Miss Alice was exacting, and we should thank her for her fastidiousness — both because of its role in preserving Waddesdon and because of what it teaches us about the value of high quality and high standards in our own lives.
On my first visit to Waddesdon, some 20 years ago, I learned of a rule of Miss Alice’s that I took to heart. “When handling a fragile object, always use two hands.”
I am happy to report that the survival rate of the wine glasses in my house has indeed improved since then — even if I failed to adopt the rule’s codicil: “Always keep silent when washing them.”
BROWSE ITEMS INSPIRED BY ALICE DE ROTHSCHILD’S COLLECTING
