Myth number 1: Hydrogen fuel is not practical and will always be too expensive

However, once we have fully decarbonised energy, low carbon hydrogen will be an essential part of the system, as the only effective solution for a variety of industrial and heavy duty use applications, providing resilience, flexibility and cost optimisation.

For instance, in today’s transitioning energy system the UK paid £1.8 billion last year to waste clean energy, including payments to wind farm developers of £363m to switch off.

In the future if only a small proportion of that wasted electricity is used to create hydrogen, by having strategically located, national grid connected electrolysers near fuel and demand clusters, we could utilise many TWh of curtailed power, save money and make many millions of litres of diesel equivalent energy, effectively free.

To deliver this within the next 10 years to meet our clean power targets and with a relatively small investment in the capital costs for making and distributing the hydrogen to refuelling facilities (back to base or public facilities), that is far less expensive than that needed to give wholesale access to for rapid charging and battery HGV.

It is entirely possible that hydrogen can be priced to businesses as a practical, cheaper alternative to diesel and certainly help mitigate against the long list of compromises needed to adapt for recharging that are not economical, such as the vehicle trade-offs in payload, asset life, seasonal variation, utilisation and loss of flexibility that battery electric often requires.