The IMechE Engineering a Hydrogen Economy 2026 conference was held in Birmingham on 29-30 April.
Paul Dodds (University College London), the Economics theme lead in UK-HyRES, gave an invited plenary presentation on “The economics of hydrogen production”. UCL have been examining whether hydrogen production could be designed to support a UK renewable electricity system and reduce energy bills.
Paul presented technoeconomic assessments of a range of hydrogen technologies. He explained the challenge of coping with the many cost uncertainties. He showed that electricity arbitrage appears to reduce the cost of producing hydrogen, but not by much. On the other hand, given the increase in gas prices in recent years, it now appears that green hydrogen will become competitive with production from natural gas in the future.