Technical, economic and environmental issues related to electrolysers capacity targets according to the Italian Hydrogen Strategy: A critical analysis

The European Hydrogen Strategy set an electrolysers' capacity target of 40 GW by 2030. This will lead to a sudden expansion of the electrolyser industry across Europe and the unit cost of electrolyser production will steeply decrease. The purpose of the present work is to integrate the learning curve approach with the national energy and economic planning, taking the Italian Hydrogen Strategy as a case study. Different learning curves and different roadmaps for the electrolysers' installation have been combined in order to model scenarios for predicting progressive fall in the electrolysers’ CAPEX. The investment needed to implement the strategy ranges between 1.5 and 3.3 G€ and depends mainly on the learning curve scenario. The Levelized Cost of Hydrogen has been calculated by changing different boundary conditions. Moreover, an incentive scheme has been proposed by comparing the green hydrogen cost to the blue and grey ones. Under the hypothesis of a fully-blended hydrogen use in the gas grid, a potential CO2 reduction up to 8.4 MtonCO2 over the decade can be accomplished. The main barrier to the economic competitiveness of Power to Gas systems is the still too high price of renewable electricity. It will be optimistic to obtain hydrogen prices lower than 2.44 €/kgH2 in Italy by 2030. Nevertheless, the deployment of the Hydrogen Valleys, where both production and consumption coexist, can reduce the carbon avoidance cost. Finally, it has been demonstrated that the failure to achieve the European targets is associated with higher hydrogen production costs and higher decarbonisation costs.