This week EnerTech held another webinar from our Strategic Summit Series. This invite-only event focused on hydrogen adoption trends and opportunities. The primary discussion was around the “demand” portion of the hydrogen value chain with a heavy focus on opportunities in the mobility space; more specifically, advances related to heavy-duty vehicles, buses, light-duty vehicles, and associated fueling infrastructure.
We had an incredible panel led by one of our Managing Director's, Jarett Carson, including Ballard Power President and CEO Randy MacEwen, Plug Power Director of Investor Relations Roberto Friedlander, and Guidehouse Partner (Energy, Sustainability, & Infrastructure) Mark Eisenhower.
With over 120 attendees we had one of our best summits yet with many insightful questions from the audience and very informative and thought provoking discussions. Here are a few of the key take-aways:
To increase hydrogen utilization, you need production, storage and logistics at scale and policies that support value chain and adoption.
To reach long term decarbonization goals the world will need more green molecules like hydrogen.
It will be the combination of electrification and hydrogen that will help get us to the global future emission targets.
In addition to higher payload, longer range, and fast refueling, hydrogen fuel cell’s advantage in heavy-duty, long haul segment includes its lower barrier of entry on the refueling side (centralized and point-to-point refueling), as well as medium-to-heavy duty vehicle segments’ disproportionate contribution to the GHG emission.
Light duty vehicles with high uptime and high utilization (e.g. taxi, light commercial vehicle) will see their opportunities in FCEV.
Hydrogen refueling infrastructure could be used by a variety of applications, forming Hydrogen Clusters (e.g. at the port for forklifts, marine) – which further drives down the cost of this clean molecule. We will see more multimodal hydrogen clusters/valleys being developed in the future.
Fuel cell cost has decline by 70% since 2008 - Ballard has a cost reduction program over the next 3 years for another 70% decrease in fuel cell costs and they believe electrolyzers with sizes of 100-to-150 GW will be in the market by 2030.
Natural gas utilities have a significant role in building out the fueling infrastructure whereas the electric utilities are essential in the production of green hydrogen.
Ballard has FCEVs operating in deserts and will be validating class 8 trucks in Alberta – they haven’t seen the type of degradation in BEVs in cold weather conditions in FCEVs.
A big thank you to our attendees and to our panel members for making this such a success event!
We hope you're able to join us for our next EnerTech Strategic Summit.
For more information on how you can attend one of our webinars please contact Wally Hunter at whunter@enertechcapital.com
