With the push for hydrogen as a clean source of energy gathering pace in Europe, one of the region’s biggest utilities cautioned that it’ll be another decade before the fuel is profitable.
“It will take 10 to 15 years until this business can yield decent results,” Anja-Isabel Dotzenrath, CEO of RWE AG’s renewables unit, said in an interview. “However, it’s an attractive long-term growth area for RWE.”
While green hydrogen — made from renewable power sources — is increasingly seen as one of the best ways to reduce emissions from industry and transportation, production costs are still double that of making the fuel from natural gas, according to BloombergNEF.
Those costs are forecast to fall as hydrogen plays a key part in the European Union’s Green Deal and Germany has pledged to invest €9-billion in local green hydrogen production. That political support is necessary for the technology to take off, Dotzenrath said.