During the sell-out Summit of the 2022 Hydrogen Americas Summit, we spoke to global and regional #hydrogen and #energy leaders about the future outlook for the hydrogen industry, including an interview with Jon André Løkke, Former President of Hydrogen Europe.
What message are you here to share with the audience?
First of all it was good to kind of share some of the perspectives of what’s going on on the two different sides of the Atlantic but I think the most important message now is under the current geopolitical challenges that we have around the globe, and in particular in Europe now with the what is the terrible events in Ukraine, I think it’s more important than ever that Europe and the Americas (Canada, U.S. and South America) stand together and are able to rely on each other to execute on hydrogen. Hydrogen is a critical component to be able to transition the energy use, and generation and transport. And I think we together can accelerate what’s going on basically.
Is the way to the new hydrogen economy collaboration or competition?
I think eventually we need obviously competition but I think for the time being, everyone is basically losing money at the moment in this space. Because we need to build it before we can harvest, so in this market of where we are now with the immaturity of everything, I think we need to collaborate, and then we can compete later. When this is large and profitable, we can certainly compete.
What role should Government take to accelerate the hydrogen conversation?
Well there are obviously different sides that they need to cover but there a lot of things related to regulations and of course standards and stuff like that that needs to be agreed upon. Basically removing stumbling blocks, but I think also the Governments can take on a lot of early risks, where there is difficult to kind of get financing because the business case is terrible. It’s too small, it doesn’t have the scale, it’s too capital intensive, so basically getting those demo projects running and getting the ball rolling on technological developments, that’s exactly what is happening. And then maybe also covering some of those early scale ups, because that sometimes still, I mean it’s proven as a concept and a demonstrator but you need to prove it as a large demonstrator or take some of the risks in the scale up. I think there, Governments can contribute a lot, and that’s basically what you see is happening Boston, Europe and U.S. and we are very much in favor of that for Hydrogen Europe, we keep pushing that and also help. Hope to help a lot of companies in Americas succeed and generate wonderful business cases in Europe.
Why is this summit important?
It’s important because it gets a lot of people together to talk about many of the key issues, and unfortunately the list of it is very long but I think we just need to kind of take one at a time. And in the meantime we will have a lot of fun because there’s a lot of exciting technologies, a lot of enthusiastic people that are here and this is the venue to meet and discuss.
#H2Americas2023
Join them at global and regional #hydrogen and #energy leaders at #H2Americas2023 Summit & Exhibition taking place 2-3 October 2023 in Washington D.C. Produced by the Sustainable Energy Council and Co-Hosted by the U.S. Department of Energy, the event welcomes 3000 industry professionals, 170+ Speakers, 60 Exhibitors and 35+ sponsors to share the latest news, establish key connections and sign business deals to accelerate the deployment of the hydrogen economy. Visit our website for more information & to register your place among hydrogen pioneers: https://www.hydrogen-americas-summit.com/
