Vital steps for enabling private investments in hydrogen ecosystem in India

The future success of hydrogen will hinge on innovation. Today, low carbon hydrogen is more costly than unabated fossil fuel-based hydrogen, which undermines its uptake. Multiple end-use technologies at early stages of development cannot compete in open markets, in part because they have not yet realised the economies of scale that come with maturity. Governments play a key role in setting the research agenda and adopting policy tools that can incentivise the private sector to innovate and bring technologies to the market. Programmes to foster hydrogen innovation are not yet flourishing, although some positive signals are emerging and several governments have launched hydrogen- specific programmes to fund R&D in technologies across the entire hydrogen value chain. However, current public R&D spending on hydrogen is below levels dedicated in the early 2000s during the last wave of support for hydrogen technologies. Further, integrated efforts will be required to avoid bottlenecks along the value chain.