On December 3, 2022, Nicola De Blasio, Senior Fellow with the Belfer Center’s Environment and Natural Resources Program (ENRP), chaired a panel discussion, “Is Hydrogen Our Future?,” at the Rome MED – Mediterranean Dialogue (Rome MED), an annual high-level conference on Mediterranean geopolitics. The panel discussion was part of ENRP’s Future of Hydrogen project’s ongoing engagement with global policymakers, who are increasingly viewing hydrogen as a solution to meeting their decarbonization and energy security goals. 

Meeting climate goals requires investing in policy researchers.

A narrow focus on technology innovation and deployment outcomes by academic researchers can lead to recommendations for the design of policy mixes that compromise key dimensions of sociotechnical change, such as job creation, find Alejandro Nuñez-Jimenez, Christof Knoeri, Joern Hoppmann, and Volker Hoffmann.

This chapter in The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Urban and Regional Futures presents a taxonomy of photovoltaic installations based on who owns them and uses their electricity, making it easier to identify solar energy communities in urban environments and map their economic, environmental and social benefits. 

This paper focuses on the market and geopolitical implications of renewable hydrogen adoption at scale in the European Union (EU). The authors analyze long-term strategies based on three reference scenarios in which the EU prioritizes a different strategic variable: energy independence, cost (optimization), or energy security. Developing competitive and secure hydrogen markets will require close coordination between policy, technology, capital, and society—and for EU countries to unite behind a shared long-term vision.

This article investigates whether changes in domestic policy strategies of leading member states in European climate policy preceded the observed changes in the European Union’s 2030 climate and energy package. 

The European Union (EU) is highly competitive in clean technologies manufacturing and thus well-positioned to benefit from the emergence of global hydrogen markets. But a narrow focus on short-term cost considerations could drive member states to implement national roadmaps with little or no coordination among themselves and hence little or no chance of competing globally.

To accelerate the global transition to a low-carbon economy, all energy systems must be actively decarbonized. While hydrogen has been a staple in the energy and chemical industries for decades, clean hydrogen – defined as hydrogen produced from water electrolysis with zero-carbon electricity – has captured increasing political and business momentum as a versatile and sustainable energy carrier in the future carbon-free energy puzzle.