UK electrolyser manufacturer ITM Power is looking to raise £250mn ($343.7mn) in equity financing to support the expansion of its manufacturing facilities.

The move is subject to shareholder approval and involves selling a tranche of shares in the company via conditional placing at £0.05 per share.

ITM’s joint-venture partner industrial gases firm Linde, certain directors and a member of the group’s senior management will buy shares in the company in a separate move that is expected to raise an additional £20mn.

“The money raised will fund a second UK factory with even more automation and our first international manufacturing facility, as well as providing the capital necessary to continue to make our products even better,” says ITM CEO Graham Cooley.

ITM’s 1GW/yr facility at Bessemer Park was completed in January. The firm plans to use £170mn of raised capital to semi-automate Bessemer Park and build a fully automated second manufacturing facility in the UK, as well as a third international facility. Together these facilities are expected to give the company 5GW of annual manufacturing capacity by 2024.

£1.2mn – Q1 profits

£50mn will be put towards technology initiatives, which the firm hopes will achieve a 50pc reduction in electrolyser manufacturing costs within five years. The remaining capital will be used to improve organisation and management development.

In its first quarter results released this week, the firm announced a 357pc year-on-year increase in revenue to £1.2mn.

ITM is seeing a significant acceleration in demand for large scale green hydrogen projects in support of national hydrogen strategies, with the tender opportunity pipeline and contracted backlog of orders reaching over 1GW and 310MW respectively as of 30 September 2021.

National strategies worldwide have set out a total of 149GW of installed electrolyser capacity required by 2030, and a recent report by the International Energy Agency (IEA) says that a global electrolyser capacity of 3.6TW will be needed by 2050 to achieve net-zero global emissions.

As well as its commercial partnership with Linde, ITM Power has a commercial partnership agreement with Italian energy infrastructure firm Snam that includes preferred supplier status for the first 100MW of Snam’s proton-exchange-membrane electrolyser orders for delivery by 2025.

ITM is also rolling out a network of hydrogen refuelling stations in the UK. It has established a strategic partnership to create new green hydrogen production facilities with clusters of refuelling stations across Scotland.

Next year, the firm will spin off its refuelling station portfolio into a separate, but wholly owned, subsidiary called ITM Motive.

---

Author: Tom Young