Brussels, 12 June 2024

Today, at a stakeholder workshop on the European Hydrogen Bank organised by the European Commission’s DG CLIMA, it was announced that the budget for the second auction later this year would amount to €1.2 billion. This represents 25% of the Innovation Fund’s 2024 budget, with the remainder going to batteries (€1bn) and conventional grants (€2.6bn) which also support innovative hydrogen projects.

“We are glad to see the next auction moving forward with a higher budget than the pilot, though it is still short of the €3bn budget announced back in September 2022. We expect the remaining €1bn to be allocated to the next auction to ensure projects continue to receive this much-needed support to be operational by 2030 and help reach the 2030 climate and energy targets,” said Jorgo Chatzimarkakis, CEO of Hydrogen Europe.

Beyond the funding level, the design of the auction needs to continue evolving to increase its impact and to allow more projects to reach a final investment decision:

• Keeping a 5-year period for commissioning is key;

• Becoming more flexible on aid cumulation is crucial to speed up the decarbonisation of the economy;

• Ensuring European funding support to the European technology value chain is essential. Introducing resilience criteria to preserve a key role for technologies and components made in Europe would help ensure the competitiveness of the European value chain.

Hydrogen Europe recently participated in the public consultation on the terms and conditions of the next auction. Through its involvement in the European Electrolyser Partnership, it also made a specific recommendation on the design of resilience criteria in the form of pre-qualification criteria.

Hydrogen Europe will continue to work with the European Commission and industry stakeholders to shape a Hydrogen Bank that can effectively and ambitiously support the scale up of the sector, which is needed to reach our binding 2030 targets and carbon neutrality by 2050.

For more information:

Hydrogen Europe’s response to the public consultation

Hydrogen Europe’s position paper on resilience criteria