Mirela Atanasiu will be one of the speakers at the Budapest Hydrogen Summit, to be held on 10 April 2024.
Over the past years, there has been a great regulatory push at the EU level to regulate and scale up the hydrogen economy. However, there is still a lack of policies from Central and Eastern European countries. We spoke with Mirela Atanasiu, Executive Director ad interim of the Clean Hydrogen Partnership about the importance of national strategies that reflect European ones, the major technological trends, the importance of attracting both the public and the private sector and how Europe can retain its leadership in hydrogen technologies.
According to Ms Atanasiu, we need dedicated hydrogen policies that complement and follow EU ones, like the hydrogen strategy, the Fit for 55, the REPowerEU, the Green Deal and so on. And these are especially important in the CEE region as, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there is a growing need to be more energy-independent. She quotes some positive examples like the strategies being prepared or already launched by Romania and the Czech Republic.
“National programmes and legislation send the right support to hydrogen technologies, as there are often fundings behind these strategies,” Ms Atanasiu emphasises. “Also in the National Energy and Climate Plans (NECPs) countries must highlight what kind of hydrogen technologies they intend to develop, how much renewable installed capacity is needed to produce green hydrogen, electrolysers’ capacity and so on. And for this, national fundings are required, not just the EU ones.”
In particular, she recalls that regions, especially those in CEE, benefit already from structural funds (like the Cohesion Fund) for the further development of their territories and hydrogen should be included in those development plans.
“Not only to further develop these regions but also to create jobs and train people, to reach the zero-carbon objectives, to exploit the huge renewable potential,” she adds.
Earlier in January, the Clean Hydrogen Partnership launched a new hydrogen research call for proposals worth 113.5 million euros which will be made available through Horizon Europe for projects to cover research and innovations (R&I) activities across the whole hydrogen value chain.
This year, Ms Atanasiu expects once again to support hydrogen valleys with innovative business models, hopefully, in those parts of Europe where there is not enough support yet.
“We will support both small and large valleys,” she explains. “If we get more successful applications, we will use the additional 60 million euros from the REPowerEU. In addition, this year we are launching an initiative for those projects that are not mature enough to apply for the hydrogen valleys grants, but they could be in 2-3 years after we provide some project development assistance in making their roadmaps to the Final Investment Decision (FID) stage.”
Regarding hydrogen valleys, the Executive Director ad interim of the Clean Hydrogen Partnership recalls that there are many valleys registered on the online platform, including those not funded by the Clean Hydrogen Partnership, which means there is a huge interest in this direction. However, not all of the possible projects meet the criteria to be considered a valley.
“Either we identify a valley and we propose its initiator to be included in the platform, or we receive weekly proposals from the initiators,” she clarifies. “But to be included on the platform they have to be at least at the pre-feasibility stage. Now there are almost 90 hydrogen valleys worldwide and around 60 are in Europe, which means we are on track to reach our goals. Nevertheless, only a few of them reached the FID stage. Why is that? What is blocking hydrogen projects? We have to be careful and try to answer these questions because it is not always financing, often it is because of other issues, like permitting.”
She also mentions the continuous support for R&I across the whole hydrogen value chain, from the production to the distribution, from the storage to the end use.
“We are looking for innovative solutions in terms of electrolysers and new materials to replace the polymeric materials contained in some of them, to make them more performant, cheaper and, at the same time, replace those critical materials whose exports we are dependent on as we don’t have them in Europe,” she says.
This aspect is particularly important to make Europe more competitive and to focus more on the industrial aspect of the Green Deal, as underlined recently by major EU officials.
“Not all technologies are profitable,” Ms Atanasiu says. “We bring them to the market and we know they work but they are still expensive like all new technologies. Other than funding opportunities, it is important to prepare the right regulatory framework so as to protect European manufacturers and not allow products from third countries to enter the European market. For example, China is now producing electrolysers at half the price. Europe has the know-how and has shown to be a leader in hydrogen technologies. Now the Chinese manufacturers are catching up, offering cheaper products and we risk losing our competitiveness like it happened with other technologies.”
However, many still quote the high costs as the major obstacle to a real scale-up of the hydrogen economy. Mirela Atanasiu tells us that the private sector is already investing, although not at the pace it should. For example, when funding hydrogen valleys, the Clean Hydrogen Partnership only covers 20 per cent of the costs while the remaining 80 per cent is covered by regional and national funding and by the private sector.
“In our previous programme, for every euro invested by the Commission, three were invested by the private sector,” she says.
She also underlines that there is a difference between financing and funding because investment decisions take longer.
“Europe has done a lot to set the tone,” she concludes, once again referring to all the pieces of legislation and regulations that were launched by the EU in the past couple of years. “But the technology is new, it has risks and the guarantees requested by the investors are still not met. For a company to invest in a manufacturing line to produce GW of electrolysers, they need a signal that they could sell those electrolysers, therefore Europe has to create the market conditions for them to decide to invest more than they currently do.”