Country’s regions and provinces will hand out grants from the National Recovery and Resilience Plan to specific projects, many of which have already been identified

A total of €450m ($490m) in direct grants are to be handed out to green hydrogen projects in Italy, after the European Commission (EC) gave the green light to the proposal.

A total of €450m ($490m) in direct grants are to be handed out to green hydrogen projects in Italy, after the European Commission (EC) gave the green light to the proposal.

“The investment aims to support the local production and use of green hydrogen in industry, SMEs [small and medium-sized enterprises], and local transport, thus creating new hydrogen valleys (hydrogen districts), especially in southern Italy, where hydrogen is produced from renewable sources in the area and used locally,”the Ministry of the Environment and Energy Security announced on 1 February. 

“The purpose of the measure is to re-use abandoned industrial areas as experimental units for the production of hydrogen in local RES [renewable energy sources] plants, located in the same industrial complex or in neighbouring areas.”

The stated goal is to complete at least ten brownfield green hydrogen production projects with a total capacity of “at least 10-50MW”, with all the funding handed out by the end of 2025.

“This €450m scheme will allow Italy to accelerate the deployment of renewable hydrogen capacities, in line with the EU Hydrogen Strategy,” said Margrethe Vestager, EC executive vice-president in charge of competition policy.

“The measure will also help Italy reduce its dependence on imported fossil fuels, in line with the REPowerEU Plan, while ensuring that any potential competition distortions are kept to the minimum.”

Most of the 20 Italian regions have already published a ranking of projects that have applied for the funding, creating a kind of preferred candidate status for particular companies’ plans.

And some regions have apparently awarded the cash already.

For instance, Bologna-based utility Hera and gas distributor Snam announced yesterday that the regional council of Emilia Romagna in northern Italy had awarded €19.5m to the companies’ IdrogeMO [sic] project, which will produce up to 400 tonnes of green hydrogen from an electrolyser powered by a 6MW solar farm and a battery.

In Liguria, a region in Italy’s northwest that contains Genoa, €13.72m is set to go to an Enel project in the town of La Spezia, which will produce 134 tonnes of green hydrogen annually.

And in the region of Veneto, which includes Venice and Verona, the entire €17.3m budget is due to go to Sapio Group’s Hydrogen Valley Venezia project.

Source：Hydrogen Insight