The Net-Zero Europe Platform will help oversee all the measures under the Act. It will bring together the European Commission and Member States, to coordinate and discuss the proposed actions. Industry representatives and other experts can be invited to the Platform.
European Hydrogen Bank
Hydrogen is one of the key technologies of Europe’s Net-Zero Industry Act. It is indispensable to decarbonise European industry and reach the EU’s 2030 climate targets and 2050 climate neutrality. By scaling up its production, we will reduce the use of fossil fuels in European industries and serve the needs of hard-to-electrify sectors.
The European Hydrogen Bank will support the uptake of renewable hydrogen within the EU as well as imports from international partners. It aims to unlock private investments in hydrogen value chains by efficiently connecting renewable energy supply to demand and addressing the initial investment challenges.
The Bank will create an emerging European hydrogen market, offer new growth opportunities and quality job creation and help reach the EU’s hydrogen goals, in line with REPowerEU and the path to climate neutrality.
The first pilot auctions will be launched under the Innovation Fund in the autumn of 2023 supporting renewable hydrogen production. This sends a clear signal that Europe is the place for hydrogen production.
Background
The EU has committed to achieve climate neutrality by 2050, but it is currently a net importer of several net-zero technologies and components that are key to achieve this objective. The Commission has therefore proposed the Net-Zero Industry Act as part of the Green Deal Industrial Plan to ensure that the green transition is not put at risk by strategic dependencies. By setting an aggregate manufacturing capacity objective for 2030 and simplifying the regulatory framework for net-zero technologies, the Act will allow the EU to become an industrial leader in this market. Learning from the lessons of the Covid-19 pandemic and the energy crisis, the Act will make sure that supplies chains will no longer face disruptions and that the clean-energy transition will be underpinned by the domestic manufacturing capacity that’s needed.
