Since its invention more than a century ago, electrolytic hydrogen has fallen short of the world’s high expectations. It is proven as an energy carrier and irreplaceable chemical feedstock, but its adoption has been constrained by high costs. Electrolyzers remain expensive to manufacture and install. The cheap renewable power they need is too often limited by intermittency, unreliability, a congested electric grid, and a crowded interconnection queue. To bridge this gap between promise and reality, electrolytic hydrogen has relied on subsidies and incentives. But with policy shifts, that strategy has become untenable. The industry must finally stand on its own, with an overall cost low enough to excite an eager global market.
EVOLOH was founded to solve the economic challenge of electrolytic hydrogen—not with any singular new technology, but with a comprehensive approach to every aspect of electrolyzer manufacturing and operation. For years, EVOLOH has been systematically rethinking the industry’s assumptions, with a relentless focus on developing and supplying electrolyzer stacks that can serve as the centerpiece of a booming electrochemical industry.
EVOLOH now has the technoeconomic solution. We have innovated our way through electrolytic hydrogen’s constraints, to unlock industry-defining economics. By working to reduce every contributor to cost—from the supply chain to the manufacturing process, from the power supply to the warranty—we have transformed the industry’s expectations. Our electrolyzer stacks open a path to market competitive hydrogen without subsidies or incentives.
Taken together, EVOLOH has driven the levelized cost of hydrogen (LCOH) well below $2/kg—making it competitive with the dominant (non-electrolytic) hydrogen production methods in use today.
EVOLOH’s Approach
Our breakthrough electrolyzer platform is built for energy fundamentals, not policy tailwinds. It is based on three pillars:
Up to two-thirds the cost of an electrolytic hydrogen molecule is electricity, which has made low power prices the most important criteria for development. But the energy landscape is complicated. In certain times and places, abundant electrons generated from renewable sources drive electricity costs to zero, or below. At other moments, capacity shortages stress the system, threatening reliability and raising contracted energy prices. On top of all that, gridlocked interconnection queues lengthen the time to bring new generation online, increasing overall costs, extending development timelines, and further constraining supply. The economic inefficiency of excess renewable generation has constrained the entire industry.
EVOLOH’s platform unlocks the cheapest electrons by operating behind the meter. Our electrolyzers turn the challenges of intermittent solar power into advantages, thanks to their ability to connect directly to variable solar resources. Unlike legacy electrolyzer technologies that require steady, round-the-clock power and rely on short-term energy storage to maintain efficiency and prevent degradation of their delicate components, EVOLOH’s electrolyzers are designed to load-follow variable generation. They do this without complex or costly power electronics or batteries —the second largest cost in an installation. By connecting directly to the unregulated DC bus of a solar field, developers can tap into the lowest-cost renewable energy—which would otherwise be lost to congestion or surplus. In remote locations with abundant solar potential but no grid to take it, these lowest-cost electrons can be stored and transported as hydrogen, ammonia, or other energy carriers—opening access to global markets that would otherwise be out of reach.
The promise of electrolytic hydrogen has always been its ability to harness the variability of renewables. But until now, engineering constraints made that uneconomical to achieve. EVOLOH’s electrolyzers change that.
The manufacture of electrolyzers has suffered from a fundamental chicken and egg problem. Economies of scale have necessitated huge giga-factories. But gigafactories have required huge orders to justify the hundreds of millions of dollars in necessary investment. EVOLOH eliminates this problem with low-cost factories that achieve economies of scale even at low utilization rates—and can scale up as demand increases. All components are manufactured using processes adapted from mature industries, reducing risk and increasing reliability. Repeating stack components are produced from coils in high-speed roll-to-roll processing lines, enabling industry-leading throughput for a given footprint. This approach lowers factory costs, maximizes inventory turnover, and simplifies factory financing.
As well, EVOLOH stacks are made exclusively from earth abundant, commonly available raw materials, with robust domestic supply chains that are immune to geopolitical disruption and conducive to localization around the world. This allows EVOLOH’s factories to reach remarkable economies of scale even at very low utilization rates, shielding our cost structure from the potential volatility of future markets and providing EVOLOH with unprecedented market resilience.
EVOLOH’s cost revolution is driven by a range of additional engineering advantages that are difficult to quantify but defined by their simplicity. From the beginning, we designed our electrolyzer stacks with the system integrator in mind. We eliminated the need for expensive or custom power electronics—significantly reducing production costs and minimizing engineering risk. And we designed our stacks to be small and light enough to fit in a standard shipping container, to be moved by a single forklift, and to be installed by a single person. Rather than ignoring these soft parameters—like shipping complexity, installation time, and equipment lead times—we have instead optimized them to make EVOLOH stacks the center of successful electrolytic hydrogen projects.