Wates hails hydrogen as a sustainable fuel of the future

Wates Group sees hydrogen as a major contributor to its plans to reduce carbon emissions across its operations after successfully trialling a JCB generator powered by the fuel.

The company, one of the UK’s leading family-owned development, building and property maintenance companies, has been trialling a JCB 60kVA hydrogen combustion generator on a site near Wolverhampton. Coupled with a 104kWh Powerpack battery storage unit, the intelligent combined power system can operate on battery power alone, as a hybrid (using both battery and generator power), or hydrogen-powered only.

Zero emission power on sites is a fundamental building block to get us to our ambition. We’re really excited to partner with JCB on hydrogen, because its cleaner energy. Fundamentally, it’s about the emissions, the particulates and the noise that you associate with a diesel generator. We need to be changing quite rapidly, to adapt to what our customers want, to what our broader stakeholders want, but also to what we believe is our responsibility in addressing the challenges of climate change and biodiversity loss.