Niti Aayog Chief Executive Officer Amitabh Kant has said the government is aiming to bring down the cost of Green Hydrogen to as low as $1 per Kilogram by the end of this decade in 2030 and this is made possible by the low cost of generation of renewable energy in the country.
“Our aim is to bring down the cost of green hydrogen to $2.5 per Kilogram by 2025 and $1 per Kilogram by 2030. This is possible only by increasing size and scale of hydrogen manufacturing,” Kant said commenting on a workshop on funding for creation of Green Hydrogen Hubs in India, jointly organised by the Aayog and industry body India Hydrogen Alliance (IH2A).
IH2A has proposed the creation of a H2Bharat Public-Private Taskforce for a GW-scale national hydrogen hub development plan to NITI Aayog and the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) with the aim of identifying five large GW-scale Green Hydrogen hubs for development in India, within the next 18-months.
The proposal was the result of the workshop to build the hydrogen economy in India. It was attended by representatives from the European Investment Bank (EIB), World Bank, OECD, GIZ, CDC and FMO, Government of India, Government of Kerala and industry players from across the hydrogen value chain.
“With rapidly falling renewable energy costs, India’s green H2 production cost is expected to be amongst the lowest in the world. The H2Bharat Taskforce is an interesting proposal to kick-start green hydrogen project development at large GW-scale,” Kant said.
India will need investments of around $25 billion, from public and private sectors, to create a domestic green H2 supply chain with national installed electrolyser capacity of 25 GW producing 5 MT of Green Hydrogen by 2030.
The workshop recommended that India should replicate the global best-practice of GW-scale Green H2 hubs with co-located Green H2 production and consumption, across different use cases, in a single regional cluster or hub, to commercialise Green hydrogen.
It has also suggested that sovereign green bonds and global climate finance commitments can provide the necessary funding for these Green Hydrogen hubs and multilateral and government agencies can play a key role in early market development by part-funding design and pre-feasibility studies for the hubs.
