Fronius rolls out its first customer SolHub solar

Well-respected Austrian solar energy company Fronius has broken ground on its first customer green hydrogen hub, giving us a good look at what it'll take to run a fleet of vehicles on green hydrogen produced entirely on-site using solar panels.

The first Fronius SolHub is under construction as part of SAN Group's new hydrogen facility in Herzogenburg, Lower Austria. Producing an average of around 100 kg of clean hydrogen a day, it'll be used as a filling station for SAN's own hydrogen vehicles. SAN is also working out deals with other companies interested in potentially running their own similar hubs, to use this facility as a demonstrator of sorts.

The aim here is to generate hydrogen fuel in a completely standalone, self-contained and clean fashion, and to do so, the SolHub requires some 1.5 megawatts of photovoltaic panels. That's not a small installation – the average home rooftop system is typically around 3-6 kilowatts, to put things in context. For 1.5 MW of solar, you're looking at some 5,000 or more panels, taking up close to 100,000 square feet (9,000 square meters) of space.