IESA Partners With Greenstat Hydrogen to Support India’s Hydrogen Mission

IESA and Greenstat Hydrogen India have partnered for a period of two years to accelerate the hydrogen technology development in India.

India Energy Storage Alliance (IESA), India’s leading alliance on energy storage & e-mobility and Greenstat Hydrogen India, a Norwegian energy organization, recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding for a period of two years to accelerate the hydrogen technology development in India. The objective of this partnership is to collaborate on the establishment of a Norwegian Centre of Excellence on Hydrogen in India and to support the development of green hydrogen technologies in India.

The government of India announced in the Union Budget 2021, its plan to launch a National Hydrogen Mission and may come out with a draft mission in the next two months. For the current financial year, the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) has been allotted Rs 25 crore for research and development (R&D) in hydrogen. 

Debi Prasad Dash, Executive Director, IESA said that the alliance is happy to partner with Greenstat Hydrogen India to accelerate the adoption of hydrogen technologies in India. “For India, Hydrogen presents a potential opportunity 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 decarbonisation of grid, industrial sector, and transportation sector in coming decade.”

Once the draft of the mission is in place, it will be floated for public consultation. There will be five key areas the government will focus on which includes R&D, demand creation, how it can be used in industry, to create an eco-system including policies for this and how-to bring industry on board along with international partnerships. In these five areas, demand creation will focus on what kind of niche products can be taken up and how effectively the fuel can be used 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 fertiliser sector. MNRE has indicated that by 2025-26, the industrial sector will be one of the major recipients of hydrogen.

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.”

In November 2020, The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) and Greenstat Hydrogen India had announced a research partnership aimed at accelerating the deployment of hydrogen technologies in India. With the focus on establishment of a Norwegian Centre of Excellence on Hydrogen in India.