Sunfire Brand Guidelines: The Bremen-Born Electrolyser Maker Now Based in Dresden

A synthetic-fuel start-up with a capital F.

Sunfire’s story starts in Bremen, not Dresden. A company press release issued in Dresden on 18 May 2011 says that SunFire GmbH, written with a capital F at the time, was set up in Bremen in June 2010, with Carl Berninghausen as chief executive and Christian von Olshausen as chief technology officer. The same release names Bodo Wolf, the founder of CHOREN Industries, as the initiator and a co-founder of the company, and says it was financed by a group of private investors. Its goal was synthetic fuel: a process for turning carbon dioxide and water into petrol, diesel and kerosene with renewable electricity, which the release says had been tested since 2008.

The company’s own timeline today tells the same start. It says that in 2008 Berninghausen, von Olshausen and Nils Aldag began researching alternative fuels for transport, and it dates the founding of Sunfire to 2010. The 2011 release lists Aldag in business development; he later became chief executive.

The move to Dresden came through an acquisition. In May 2011 SunFire announced it was taking over Staxera, a Dresden developer and maker of solid oxide fuel cell stacks founded in 2005, from the automotive supplier Webasto, which stayed on as a silent partner. Electrolysis reverses the principle of a fuel cell, the release explained, and the parts of the two kinds of stack are very similar, so Staxera would add high-temperature SOEC electrolysis to its range. The Bremen and Dresden sites were both kept at the time; today the company’s imprint gives the head office of Sunfire SE as Dresden.

Two kinds of electrolyser.

Sunfire’s early aim was fuel rather than hydrogen. Its timeline says it opened an industrial-scale power-to-liquids plant at its Dresden headquarters in 2014, producing one barrel of e-fuel a day, which the company calls the world’s first, and that in 2015 it validated an SOEC electrolyser at the steelmaker Salzgitter and opened its own centre for electrodes and stack ceramics in Dresden. In 2020, the company says, it moved its business model further towards hydrogen electrolysis, and Berninghausen handed the chief executive role to Aldag and joined the supervisory board.

Two acquisitions in 2021 widened the range, according to the company: IHT of Switzerland, a maker of pressurised alkaline electrolysis equipment with more than 70 years of history, and MTV NT of Solingen, an electroplating firm that coats large components. Sunfire now sells two families under the HyLink name. HyLink Alkaline uses pressurised alkaline stacks; the company describes a 10 MW module, HyLink Alkaline 22, for projects of up to 100 MW, and a 50 MW module, HyLink Alkaline 23, for larger plants. HyLink SOEC is a solid oxide electrolyser that runs on steam at around 800 °C, which the company offers as a standard 10 MW module.

Fuel cells were part of the business from the start. Renewable Energy Magazine reported on 7 March 2024 that Sunfire, which had developed electrolysers and fuel cells in parallel since its founding in 2010, was spinning off its fuel cell arm. The former Sunfire Fuel Cells GmbH in Neubrandenburg, which makes solid oxide fuel cells for off-grid power, became independent under its managing director Matthias Boltze, who had founded it in 2010, and took back the name new enerday. Aldag told the magazine that Sunfire would now put its resources entirely into its pressurised alkaline and high-temperature SOEC electrolysers.

Hydrogen and its image.

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.

The Electrolysis Partner.

That same week, on 5 March 2024, Renewable Energy Magazine reported that Sunfire had raised a Series E equity round, backed by a loan from the European Investment Bank and previously approved grant funding. The new investors it named included LGT Private Banking, GIC, Ahren Innovation Capital and Carbon Equity, while existing shareholders such as Lightrock, Planet First Partners and the Amazon Climate Pledge Fund added to their stakes. The company said it was aiming to install several gigawatts of electrolysers by 2030.

Sunfire, which now operates as Sunfire SE, lists production sites in Dresden, Solingen and Magdeburg, with an office in Berlin, and says it employs more than 700 people. It says it makes and electroplates its alkaline cells in Solingen, where it opened an automated electroplating line in 2023, and that it works on assembly with Schaeffler’s plant in Limbach-Oberfrohna, formerly part of Vitesco Technologies. Among the projects the company names are an alkaline electrolyser commissioned in 2022 for the Austrian grocer MPREIS and an order from RWE for its Lingen site. In January 2026 Sunfire announced orders for two 100 MW plants in Spain, one with Repsol and Enagás Renovable near Cartagena and one at Petronor’s refinery in Muskiz, each built from ten 10 MW pressurised alkaline modules, with commissioning planned for 2029.

The brand speaks in plain engineering terms. Its website calls Sunfire “The Electrolysis Partner” and uses the line “Cleantech Made in Europe,” and it names its products with one family word, HyLink, followed by the technology. Nils Aldag chairs the management board, the imprint says, and Frank Mastiaux chairs the supervisory board.

For a design guide, Sunfire shows how a company that began with synthetic fuel in Bremen and grew through a Dresden fuel cell maker can present itself as one product family with two technologies. Compare it with Siemens Energy, another German energy-technology company, and with McPhy, the French hydrogen equipment maker liquidated in 2025. For this guide we use a kiln orange, graphite and steam white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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