India Energy Storage Alliance (IESA) and Greenstat Hydrogen India, a Norwegian energy organization, have signed a Memorandum of Understanding for two years to accelerate the hydrogen technology development in India. The two partners will collaborate on establishing a Norwegian Centre of Excellence on Hydrogen in India and the development of green hydrogen technologies in India.
In the Union Budget 2021, India’s government announced its plan to launch a National Hydrogen Mission. The draft mission is likely in the next two months.
For the financial year 2021-22, the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) has been allotted INR 25 crore for research and development (R&D) in hydrogen.
Once the draft of the mission is in place, it will be floated for public consultation. There will be five focus areas, including R&D, demand creation, industry application, eco-system creation (including policies) and bringing industry on board along with international partnerships.
In these five areas, demand creation will focus on the niche products that can be taken up and effective use of the fuel in trucks and buses. In the industrial sector, the government is looking at hydrogen as a replacement for coke in the steel industry and making use of the fuel in the fertilizer sector. The Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) has indicated that by 2025-26, the industrial sector will be one of the major hydrogen recipients.
Debi Prasad Dash, Executive Director, India Energy Storage Alliance (IESA) said hydrogen presents a potential opportunity for India to decrease reliance on oil imports and focus on alternate energy sources. In line with the industry needs, IESA launched the MIGHT (Mobility and Infrastructure with Green Hydrogen Technology) initiative in 2020 for supporting policies to enable use of green hydrogen in both stationery and mobility sector.
“We anticipate that advanced chemistry cell battery manufacturing mission and hydrogen mission together can enable India to fast-track decarbonization of grid, industrial sector, and transportation sector in the coming decade,” he added.
Sturle Pedersen, Chairman, Greenstat Hydrogen India, said, “Leading a broad representation of Norwegian cutting-edge expertise within the hydrogen sector, we are thrilled to be a part of this exciting journey together with IESA, the Indian industry, R&D institutes and the Indian government. Hydrogen is already a dominant part of the energy value chain world-wide. The challenge now is to revert the energy ecosystem back into its natural evolution. Renewable energy must replace fossil fuels, to preserve our habitat, and to preserve our mobility. Hydrogen is the natural energy carrier representing a vital part of the sustainable energy solution together with sustainable battery manufacturing.”
Since 2012, IESA has been working to help address enabling policy framework for all forms of energy storage technologies for both stationary and emobility applications. It worked to include hydrogen as part of the National Energy Storage Mission developed for the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy in 2018.
This content is protected by copyright and may not be reused. If you want to cooperate with us and would like to reuse some of our content, please contact: editors@pv-magazine.com.
1 comment
By submitting this form you agree to pv magazine using your data for the purposes of publishing your comment.
Your personal data will only be disclosed or otherwise transmitted to third parties for the purposes of spam filtering or if this is necessary for technical maintenance of the website. Any other transfer to third parties will not take place unless this is justified on the basis of applicable data protection regulations or if pv magazine is legally obliged to do so.
You may revoke this consent at any time with effect for the future, in which case your personal data will be deleted immediately. Otherwise, your data will be deleted if pv magazine has processed your request or the purpose of data storage is fulfilled.
Further information on data privacy can be found in our Data Protection Policy.