Scaling up hydrogen—why patience is a virtue

Hydrogen is positioned as a core pillar of the global energy transition. How it is scaled up will play a crucial role in creating a sustainable roadmap for the hydrogen economy

With any nascent technology, appropriate scale-up is needed to drive economies of scale, accelerate market growth and ultimately prove success. As the world looks to transform the energy system through the use of clean technologies, including green hydrogen, we must ensure that these solutions are durable, reliable and—importantly—scalable. The benefits of a gradual scale-up for new technologies become clear when we reflect on lessons from our past. Take the global wind industry, for example. Today, we see a total generation capacity of 650GW and 19pc year-on-year growth, but looking back on the industry’s early stages, we see a very different picture. In the late 1980s, Germany’s Growian tu