Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, if he will make an assessment of the potential merits of investing funds from the public purse in electrolyser deployment.

The Government is committed to developing hydrogen as a strategic decarbonised energy carrier.

We are investing in hydrogen innovation across the value chain. This includes the £33 million Low Carbon Hydrogen Supply competition aimed to accelerate the development of low carbon bulk hydrogen supply solutions and the Storage at Scale Competition, which looked for innovative, replicable large scale energy storage solutions that could provide a market competitive alternative to conventional commercial large-scale energy storage technologies. These included projects supporting electrolysis.

We are considering revenue support delivered by business models to support the deployment of, and investment in, low carbon hydrogen production and developing a £100m Low Carbon Hydrogen Production Fund, announced in August 2019 to stimulate capital investment. Again, electrolysis is included in the scope of this work.

The Government intends to publish a hydrogen strategy early in 2021, which will include discussion around the costs associated with expansion of the UK hydrogen economy, including scale up of production, and how these might be met.