New Delhi: Hero Future Energies (HFE), a renewable energy developer and part of the Hero Group, is exploring green hydrogen project opportunities in India and expects to make announcements in the coming months, its Global Chief Executive Officer, Srivatsan Iyer, told ETEnergyWorld.
“Green hydrogen is a focal area of interest for us. We are actively engaging with various customers across India to explore diverse project opportunities. We anticipate making some announcements in the coming months as these discussions progress and materialise into concrete initiatives,” he said in an exclusive interaction.
Iyer added that the company is looking at green hydrogen in two ways. One is for supplying for conventional usage and to replace alternate materials or alternate solutions.
“We are spending time looking at green hydrogen derivatives as well… What potential that they might have such as green ammonia for example. That space is starting to pick up now both in India, but especially for global markets and there is a lot of interest now among global players to start looking at green chemicals as well and derivatives,” he said.
The International Finance Corporation and KKR-backed firm is not looking at production of green hydrogen electrolysers.
“We are not looking at production of electrolysers even though we signed a strategic MoU with Ohmium… We continue to source from the market and look at the best technology that is available, but electrolyser manufacturing is not in our plans,” Iyer added.
The company has partnered with Ohmium International, which is an electrolyser company that manufactures in Bangalore, for developing 1,000 MW of green hydrogen production facilities in India, UK and rest of Europe.
On this year’s Budget allocation for green hydrogen, which increased by about 102 per cent, he said that it comes as a very positive sign however demand mandates are necessary.
“I think the one area the government could consider is to start having a certain level of demand mandates. There has been a lot of conversation with the government, the policymakers and the industry has approached them multiple times,” he said.
Iyer added that this would help kick off the sector as the large consumers today are refining and fertilisers sectors.
He said that the cost base for them for using green versus gray is still large enough that the adoption is a little slow and the best way to bring down the cost of green hydrogen is to increase adoption because it allows everybody to get on the learning curve, the experience curve, and also to get to a minimum scale.
“So, if there are demand mandates by the government in certain sectors over the next five years, which could also be phased out over a period of time, then that could help accelerate the adoption of green hydrogen,” added Iyer.
On making green hydrogen available directly to the consumers or public, Iyer said that there are again two areas possibly that could work.
“One that could have the largest impact is to blend it in the city gas distribution system and. It would have to be at a low level of blending initially, as everybody learns how to blend it. Some of the safety standards need to be worked out,” he said.
Iyer added that the other way to get closer to the consumer is in heavy-duty mobility.
“For example, in trucking in long distance trucks or buses where initially instead of having a fuel cell vehicle we can retrofit existing internal combustion engine vehicles and co-fit hydrogen with the diesel. Gradually, this blending can also be increased,” he added.
HFE has 3-GW of grid-connected wind, solar, and rooftop solar power generating assets operating in India and Europe and another 2 GW of projects in the pipeline across India, Vietnam, Bangladesh, and UK.
