ITM Power Brand Guidelines: The Sheffield Electrolyser Maker Listed on AIM Since 2004

A fuel cell start-up that turned to electrolysers.

ITM Power was founded in June 2000. The company names its founders as Don Highgate, Jon Lloyd and John Wreford, and its own timeline says that Simon Bourne, hired as a research scientist in 2002, is now its chief technology officer. English Wikipedia says the business began in Saffron Walden, in Essex, and first worked on fuel cells before moving into electrolysers, the machines that use electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen.

The company went to the stock market early. In 2004 it floated on AIM, the London Stock Exchange’s market for growing companies; ITM and English Wikipedia both describe it as the first hydrogen company listed on the London exchange. Its own timeline then records a 10-kilowatt electrolyser in 2008 and its first sale in April 2010, a 4.5-kilowatt unit for the University of Birmingham. A German subsidiary, ITM Power GmbH, followed in 2011, according to Wikipedia.

For much of its first decade and a half the company also built and ran hydrogen filling stations. Wikipedia records a station called Hfuel at the University of Nottingham in 2012. In September 2015 the BBC reported that “Sheffield based ITM” had opened a hydrogen refuelling station at the Advanced Manufacturing Park near the M1 in Rotherham, using electricity from a wind turbine to split water on site; the BBC said the company then employed about 70 people in South Yorkshire and planned two more stations in London. That refuelling business, Motive Fuels Ltd, was sold to the investment group HYCAP in 2023, Wikipedia says, leaving ITM focused on making electrolysers.

Stacks, modules and containers.

ITM builds PEM electrolysers, short for proton exchange membrane. English Wikipedia describes the company as designing, manufacturing and integrating these systems to make hydrogen from renewable electricity and tap water. The core of each system is the stack; ITM’s stack platform is called Trident. Around it the company has launched larger products: Poseidon, a 20-megawatt module launched in 2023, and Neptune V, a containerised 5-megawatt plant launched in May 2024. Wikipedia says the first Neptune V contract, in November 2024, was for units going to Gutroff in Germany, and that four more were sold to La Française de l’Energie in February 2025.

Much of ITM’s work has gone into large industrial projects, usually alongside bigger partners. At Shell’s Rhineland refinery in Wesseling, Germany, the REFHYNE project, backed by European Union research funding, began producing hydrogen in July 2021, ITM’s timeline says; in August 2024 the company signed a contract with Shell for REFHYNE II, a 100-megawatt follow-on. At Herøya in Norway, Trident stacks installed by Linde Engineering at a Yara site were used for green ammonia, and that plant was inaugurated in June 2024, according to Wikipedia. In Japan, ITM and Sumitomo installed a 2-megawatt Neptune unit at Tokyo Gas’s Yokohama Techno Station in March 2024.

In Britain the company supplied the electrolyser for HyDeploy, the trial at Keele University in Staffordshire that blended hydrogen into a private gas network, Wikipedia says. The Guardian reported in January 2020 that the blend was being used to heat 100 homes and 30 faculty buildings at Keele, in a project led by the gas network Cadent.

The largest orders so far are in Germany. In January 2023 ITM signed two contracts, each for 100 megawatts of electrolysers, with Linde Engineering for the energy company RWE at Lingen, Germany. On 4 August 2026 ITM announced that the first hydrogen from the Lingen plant had been produced and carried by pipeline to Evonik’s chemical park at Marl, as part of the GET H2 Nukleus project.

How hydrogen companies present themselves.

Hydrogen and fuel cell companies sell equipment that most people never see in use. An electrolyser splits water into hydrogen and oxygen using electricity; a fuel cell runs the reaction the other way, turning hydrogen into electricity. In the PEM designs made by several firms in this guide, the work happens in stacks of thin membranes and plates, assembled into larger systems that are often delivered in standard shipping containers, painted white or pale grey and lined up in rows at an industrial site.

That makes the sector’s public image a matter of pictures and words more than products. Company websites lean on photographs of factory floors, stacks being assembled, container rows beside wind turbines or refineries, and the vehicles that use the gas: hydrogen buses, delivery vans and, in the warehouse market, fuel-cell forklifts. Products tend to carry short, technical names, and greens and blues, suggesting water, air and renewable power, are a common choice.

The firms differ in what they actually make. Some build electrolysers to produce hydrogen; others build fuel cells to use it; and Plug Power says it covers production, storage, transport and use in one business. Several are listed companies, so their history is told as much in stock-exchange announcements, fundraisings and restructurings as in product launches, and a company’s own claims about capacity or cost should be read as claims.

The industry meets at trade fairs such as Hannover Messe in Germany and the Hydrogen Technology Expo, where stand design, demonstration stacks and project announcements do much of the brand work. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company — who founded it, who owns it, where it makes its equipment — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A listed company with industrial partners.

ITM Power plc remains a public company listed on AIM, but large industrial groups have taken part in its growth. In 2019 the gas and engineering group Linde made a strategic investment and the two set up a joint venture, ITM Linde Electrolysis, incorporated in January 2020, according to Wikipedia; the Italian gas network company Snam invested in 2020. Wikipedia also records a 2019 collaboration with Iwatani Corporation of America.

Manufacturing is concentrated in Sheffield. The company says it moved into its Bessemer Park factory, a 134,000-square-foot building, in January 2021; Wikipedia dates the official opening to August 2021 and says it was then the largest electrolyser factory in the world, with a stated capacity of one gigawatt a year. Wikipedia says ITM is headquartered there and has two further Sheffield sites and an office in Hesse, Germany.

Expansion plans were later cut back. In 2022, Wikipedia says, ITM dropped an earlier target of five gigawatts of annual capacity and a plan for a second Sheffield factory, and its long-serving chief executive Graham Cooley announced he would leave. In December 2022 Dennis Schulz, from Linde Engineering, became chief executive. In June 2025 the company launched Hydropulse GmbH, its timeline says. In July 2026 ITM said a grant from the UK Department for Energy Security and Net Zero had been formally awarded, alongside an equity investment from Great British Energy, to set up a manufacturing line for its next-generation Chronos stack in its existing Sheffield buildings.

For a design guide, ITM Power shows how an engineering company can build a brand from one product family and a run of named industrial projects. Compare Ceres Power, another British hydrogen technology company, and Plug Power, which also builds PEM electrolysers. For this guide we use a deep green, a slate grey and a pale mist with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep ITM Power’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.