In a joint contribution, Austria, Denmark, Spain, Ireland, Luxembourg and Portugal called, on Monday 9 November, for the establishment of a robust certification and monitoring system for renewable hydrogen in the EU to stimulate the installation of additional renewable electricity generation capacity needed to produce this hydrogen (through the process of electrolysis of water).
These countries criticise in particular the system of guarantees of origin set up to provide the final consumer with useful information on the origin of the electricity consumed.
They thus consider that these guarantees not only “did not trigger substantial investment in additional renewable capacity installation” in many cases, but also “risk creating a significant distortion on the internal market for hydrogen” between hydrogen produced from electricity from new renewable capacity and that produced by an electrolyser supplied from a local electricity mix which could be heavily dependent on non-renewable fuels.
They therefore call for the introduction of criteria ensuring additionality, i.e. that electrolysers should use renewable electricity from the grid which, if the electrolyser did not exist, would never have been produced, would have been wasted, would have been limited, or would constitute a seasonal or periodic surplus.
In their view, the development of such criteria by the European Commission could follow one of two principles: (1) renewable hydrogen producers may only use electricity coming from recent installations that would otherwise not have been built; (2) renewable hydrogen is produced when the average of renewable electricity on the national grid is above a baseline or when renewable electricity production exceeds demand, would be lost or curtailed and could be converted into hydrogen for storage or system efficiency reasons.
See the proposal: https://bit.ly/32s9Jq0 (Original version in French by Damien Genicot)