⚡ How India Could Become a Net Exporter of Energy
India wants to become a net exporter of renewable energy. Green hydrogen can make it happen! How? ReadOn…
2022 was a great year for hydrogen.
Japan cracked how to transport Green Hydrogen efficiently,
Toyota unveiled its hydrogen-powered car, and
Germany launched the world's first fully-hydrogen powered trains.
2023 proves to be more exciting as India has just launched the Green Hydrogen Mission: a project worth ₹19,744 crores!
What does this project aim to do? And why is the world going crazy about green hydrogen?
🧐 All That’s Great About Green Hydrogen
Green hydrogen has two main advantages:
It is available easily just like fossil fuels.
Unlike other green sources of energy, storing it is not a major issue.
And we anyway use hydrogen for a lot of things - just that it’s not “green” as it is produced using fossil fuels.
Green H2, on the other hand, uses renewable energy and water.
A switch to green hydrogen could reduce overall emissions by 50 million metric tonnes by 2030!
It could also replace other fuel sources like oil and natural gas, reducing our import bills.
🤔 Why haven't we been using it so far?
It is super expensive to produce.
Producing green hydrogen costs ~Rs. 500/kg whereas grey hydrogen (produced from fossil fuels) costs around Rs. 80/kg.
Why such a huge difference?
Producing green hydrogen requires water electrolysers and solar energy.
While solar energy is cheap, the water electrolysis process is super costly.
To help India get started, the government brought out the National Green Hydrogen Policy (NGHP) in early 2022.
As per the NGHP, any green hydrogen plant set up before 2025:
will get cheaper renewable energy for production
won't have to pay interstate taxes on the transmission of power and,
will be given storage facilities near ports to store excess fuel for free for 30 days.
This will be valid for 25 years.
Thanks to this, the big-fish are already interested.
The Adani Group, Reliance Industries, GAIL, Larsen & Toubro, NTPC, Indian Oil Corp: all are betting big on green hydrogen.
💡 The Uses of Hydrogen
Let’s look at the industrial and household use-cases.
Industrial:
We currently use 6.7 million tonnes of hydrogen annually.
Most of it is used in fuelling the manufacture of fertilisers and refining oil.
Side note: This use case may soon die out as more people are going for organic fertilisers and we are looking to cut down oil exports
Another important use case is manufacturing of cement and steel (could infact be the biggest sustainable growth opportunity for green hydrogen as it can cut down carbon emissions drastically).
But this has never been done before - so, super uncertain and risky.
Household:
We don’t use a lot of H2 fuel to power our homes.
If we had to do it - producing the hydrogen to meet even 25% of our needs would use up more energy than we currently produce!
And would require an investment of $11 trillion.
On top of that, there are two more problems:
India doesn't produce the electrolysers needed to process green hydrogen
Smaller players are struggling to enter, as it requires huge capital expenditure
That's where the Green Hydrogen Mission enters the picture.
👀 What Changes will the Green Hydrogen Mission Bring?
Helping set up more electrolyser plants and help run pilot projects for different technologies.
The Product Linked Incentive scheme will help even smaller businesses set up hydrogen plants.
Makes us wonder…
Will startups want to enter this space?
Startups usually avoid such capital intensive businesses.
Though, there are three major startups in India that are focussing on green hydrogen: Hygenco, ReNew Power and NewTrace.
What surprised us was that NewTrace has come up with new tech to create electrolysers that require less materials and are 5x cheaper than traditional electrolysers!
Feels like Indian entrepreneurs are all ready to meet our hydrogen production goals of 5 million metric tonnes per year!
✈️ Next Step: Become Exporters of Green Energy
The global demand for green hydrogen is set to be $89.18 billion by 2030.
And we have a major advantage in green hydrogen production: cheap solar energy.
India produces the cheapest solar energy in the world (INR 1.90/kWh).
Plus, Mukesh Ambani has promised to bring down green hydrogen costs to $1/kg (INR 1.60/kWh).
We could actually be the Saudi Arabia for green hydrogen very soon!
And we already have our first contract from Singapore!
However, there's one problem: competition!
Other nations like China, Japan and the US are much ahead of us in this mission.
They have been investing in green hydrogen for longer and have also begun producing it on a mass scale.
Will we be able to beat them with our new initiatives?
Only time will tell…
Till then, ReadOn :)
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POPULATÍON IS OUR STRENGTH....NOW HYDROGEN IS OUR POWER SOURCE.....