The EU is far off meeting ambitious targets it set itself for hydrogen production, with the much celebrated clean energy carrier remaining too expensive despite billions in subsidies, the bloc’s energy regulator ACER has warned.
Brussels has set a massive 40 GW capacity target for electrolysers, which use electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, for the end of the decade. If that electricity is renewable, such from wind or solar power, the hydrogen is labelled “green”.
If one includes national targets set by EU countries, the number could be as high as 54 GW, with such figures reflecting several years of hydrogen hype that have swept the bloc’s capital.
However, half-way to the 2030 deadline and after some €20 billion in subsidies from Brussels, just 300 MW worth of the devices expected to underpin an envisaged hydrogen revolution – 0.5% of the intermediate 2024 target of 6 GW – have actually been built.
And that includes a 51% surge in capacity last year, the EU’s energy regulator ACER finds in a new report.
Meanwhile, lofty predictions that “green” hydrogen – for which Brussels has set a production target of 10 million tonnes a year by 2030 – will soon be cost competitive with hydrogen produced from natural gas have failed to come true.
The EU’s version of climate-friendly hydrogen remains four times more expensive than the fossil stuff, whose production entails enormous greenhouse gas emissions, at €8 per kilogramme. ACER expects things to stay that way at least for the short to mid-term.
(rh)
