The European Commission has allocated 1.1 GW of electrolyzer capacity in the third hydrogen auction it launched in December.
Held by the European Hydrogen Bank, the procurement exercise has selected nine projects spread across seven countries and has earmarked €1.09 billion ($1.28 billion) in EU funding.
“The auction awards successful projects with a subsidy to help cover the price difference between their production costs and the market price. The objective is to incentivise clean hydrogen production and use,” the EC said in a statement. “Upon signature of their grant agreements, the nine selected projects will receive a fixed premium of between €0.57 and €3.49 per kilogramme of certified and verified hydrogen produced, for a maximum period of 10 years.”
A diverse portfolio of projects was selected across the general renewable fuels of non-biological origin (RFNBO), low-carbon, and maritime-aviation categories.
In the general RFNBO category, five projects were selected across Greece, Spain, Denmark, and Austria. Greece’s AN-1-B and Spain’s T2X projects will deliver smaller-scale renewable hydrogen production at bid prices below €0.65/kg. Denmark secured two of the largest projects in the category: NJK, led by MorGen, with 300 MW of capacity and expected production of 445,000 tonnes of hydrogen, and Alba by Hy2gen Nordic AS with 100 MW and more than 144,000 tonnes of projected output. Austria’s Hy4IND project will support industrial decarbonization through a 5 MW electrolyser installation.
Under the low-carbon category, Finland’s Cloudberry project emerged as the largest project selected in the auction, combining 500 MW of capacity with projected production exceeding 508,000 tonnes of hydrogen over ten years. It offered the lowest bid at €0.44/kg. Germany’s Lotse project will contribute an additional 120 MW and more than 140,000 tonnes of hydrogen production capacity.
In the maritime-aviation category, two Norwegian projects, called Gen2-LH2 and RogalandH2, respectively, were selected to support the decarbonisation of hard-to-abate transport sectors. Notably, these two projects offered the highest bid prices in the auctioned portfolio, at €3.48/kg and €3.49/kg respectively. Together, they will deploy around 24 MW of electrolyser capacity and produce nearly 36,000 tonnes of renewable hydrogen over the next decade.
The auction received 58 bids across 11 countries, leading to demand more than six times higher than the €1.3 billion budget available.
The European Hydrogen Bank’s first auction launched in November 2023 with a ceiling price of €4.50/kg of renewable hydrogen produced. It attracted 132 bids for 8.5 GW of electrolyzer capacity, surpassing the available budget. The EC awarded nearly €720 million to seven projects across Finland, Norway, Portugal and Spain. They submitted bids between €0.37/kg and €0.48/kg and plan to produce 1.58 million tons of renewable hydrogen over 10 years.
The second auction was launched in December 2024. It then selected 15 renewable hydrogen production projects for public funding across the European Economic Area (EEA) and awarding €992 million in subsidies. The selected projects secured feed-in premium tariffs ranging from €0.20/kg to €1.88/kg – levels some observers judged as very low, raising doubts about the viability of the projects.
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