Europe is on track to install 2700MW of electrolyser capacity for producing green hydrogen by 2025, an almost 50-fold increase on capacity built over the last 10 years, according to consultancy Delta-EE.
Delta-EE, which has conducted research into the state of the rapidly growing European hydrogen electrolyser market, found that “time is running out” to establish the many projects in the hundreds of MW scale required to hit an EU target of 6GW by 2024.
The research is the first produced by Delta-EE’s new Global Hydrogen Intelligence Service.
In the last 10 years, the project activity around clean hydrogen has been growing quickly, with 67 operational projects including electrolysers, and targeting new energy applications developed across 13 different countries.
These projects offer a total capacity of 56MW, producing an estimated 4700 tonnes of green hydrogen a year.
Approximately half of this is consumed by the transport industry, and approximately one third is used for decarbonising industrial applications, such as petrochemical refining.
Today nearly half of all European electrolyser capacity is in Germany, while no other country has more than 10MW installed.
The sector is expanding fast. Delta-EE found the first major projects in several countries (Spain, Netherlands, Denmark) will be at the tens of MW scale in 2021 and 2022, with capacities of projects set to grow to 100MW or more by 2025.
A key factor in this growth will be the increase in manufacturing capacity of electrolyser manufacturers.
Delta-EE product manager Robert Bloom said: “There are two sides to this story. On the one hand, this is incredibly rapid growth of a key technology for net zero targets; on the other, it’s still well short of the tremendously ambitious national and EU targets that have been set.
“We should remember though, that this is an embryonic market. The current project pipeline is driven almost entirely by EU or national funding with project stakeholders targeting use-sectors where state aid is strongest.
“With the huge amounts of capital made available through various national hydrogen strategies, the EU green deal and IPCEI Hydrogen, we expect to see many more projects added to the pipeline.”