German hydrogen strategy update draft fails to match US subsidies – industry

A leaked draft update to Germany’s National Hydrogen Strategy does not yet set the right conditions for the investments needed to build up the country’s hydrogen economy according to the targets, industry association BDI has said. Overall, the current draft “is far from sufficient to ensure the urgently needed ramp-up,” deputy managing director Holger Lösch said. This was especially true in comparison to the Inflation Reduction Act, which would make the U.S. “one of the most competitive places in the world for the production of green hydrogen with a pragmatic tax credit per amount of hydrogen produced,” he added.

In the effort to curb global greenhouse gas emissions, hydrogen made with renewable electricity is often seen as a panacea for sectors with particularly stubborn emissions, such as heavy industry or aviation. Tagesspiegel Background had reported that a leaked draft update of the strategy assumes a higher demand for the fuel than three years ago, when the country launched its first national strategy for the fuel. BDI’s Lösch said that updating the 2020 strategy is “urgently needed” because the government had since set an earlier target for Germany to become climate neutral (2045 instead of 2050) and increased interim climate targets due to the consequences of the war against Ukraine. The draft, seen by Clean Energy Wire, is currently finalised by the government, which had agreed a more ambitious ramp-up in its coalition agreement.