Letter on hydrogen: Innovation crucial to solving green cost conundrum

Policymakers must back development of new electrolyser technologies as well as the scale-up of established designs to bring down stubbornly high costs

“We already have the technology—it just needs to be scaled up”. Frequent attendees of hydrogen conferences will have heard this claim many times over the past two or three years as the industry grapples with the issue of high production costs. Economies of scale are, of course, crucial to bringing down green hydrogen costs, which remain too high for many potential investors and consumers, hampering the progress of hundreds of proposed projects to FID. The US Department of Energy acknowledged this in mid-March, when it announced $750m of government funding to support the scaling up of electrolyser production and to “dramatically” reduce the cost of clean hydrogen and “supercharge” progress. T