Brussels, 08/07/2009 (Agence Europe) - An allocation of €140 million will be made to projects for the development of fuel cells and hydrogen-based technologies, the European Commission announced on 2 July. This amount, half of which is financed by the Community budget (€71.3 million) and the other by industry, comes within the framework of a public-private partnership whose aim is to speed up the finalisation of these technologies in order to allow them to be marketed between 2010 and 2020. Aid will be allocated after a call for projects, in which researchers and developers may participate until 15 October. The projects selected with a view to negotiating contracts will be revealed in March 2010. This call is the second to be launched by the public-private partnership, for which the total budget amounts to around one billion euro to be invested by 2014. The 29 project topics aim to put fuel cell and hydrogen energy technologies on the market two to five years sooner than what is estimated without the support. Selected teams of researchers will investigate bottlenecks in the whole range of applications for these energy technologies, from cars to large scale power plants, as well as the whole supply chain from hydrogen production to demonstration of the market-readiness of applications. Breakthrough research should foster the use of hydrogen-fuelled buses and fuel cell vehicles. It will help develop hydrogen storage and improve fuel cell durability, performance and cost-efficiency to make green applications such as power stations or laptops ready for the market. (B.C./transl.jl)