At first, I wasn’t sure how the war in Iran would affect energy policy, as the impact of the Russian invasion ended up being quite negligible in the end. Now that the first US airline has already gone bust and jet fuel is genuinely starting to run low, I consider it quite certain that e-SAF and e-fuels will push forward, especially in Europe. The new E20 fuel is a good example of this, by the way. SAF doesn’t scale any better than before, which is why I trust in e-SAF and e-fuel.
Plug Power Inc. | Plug Power Reports Strong Q1 2026 Results with 22% Revenue Growth and 71% Margin Improvement Year over Year https://share.google/z0LG0LpF4Twase6no
Marginaalien paraneminen iso plussa, ja käteinenkään ei ole ikan heti loppumassa. Kohti positiivista EBITDAS menossa loppuvuotta kohden, niin kuin firman puolelta on lupailtukin. Tuohon vielä kun saataisiin Uzbekistanin suunnalta FIDiä H2, niin erittäin lupaavalta vaikuttaisi pitkästä aikaa.
Electricity is likely to become a massive temporary bottleneck due to data centers. Plug’s technology offers an extremely fast-reacting alternative for power generation (cf. Bloom). The production cost of green hydrogen is still high but is in a continuous decline. Power generation with green hydrogen is 100% clean, which will be a winning card in the future.
In my opinion, the potential of data centers is not priced into Plug’s share price. The market and, above all, the need for electricity will be enormous. This need cannot be solved with nuclear power, as its construction takes over 10 years and the electricity production is expensive.
I partially disagree on this matter. It is true that, at least in the United States, there is a shortage of power grids and electricity production in several places because data centers consume so much energy. The bottleneck you mentioned is real. I have read that data centers have been equipped with, for example, gas turbines to generate electricity locally for the center’s needs (the intention being to use natural gas, not hydrogen).
However, I do not see green hydrogen, or hydrogen in general, as the solution to this because hydrogen production itself consumes a huge amount of electricity, and converting hydrogen back into electricity also results in losses.
Energy is lost at every conversion stage, and after the conversion steps, less than half—possibly only a quarter—of the original electricity is usable.
When hydrogen is produced via electrolysis, the efficiency is currently 60–70 percent, meaning about a third of the electricity used is wasted as heat. When electricity is produced from hydrogen using a gas turbine or fuel cell, the efficiency is 40–55 percent. Consequently, the total efficiency in the process from electricity to hydrogen and back to electricity is 24–38 percent.
Therefore, it is economically more sensible to generate energy on-site—green or not—than to produce it on-site with hydrogen fuel cells. And if we talk about green hydrogen, for instance, three wind turbines used for green hydrogen production are equivalent to one wind turbine right next to the data center.
Hydrogen’s current applications in fields like medicine and the semiconductor industry are real (as we have learned since the closure of the Strait of Hormuz), and it certainly has its niche as a clean energy source for heavy transport—even if Hyzon and Nikola went bust—in applications where battery technology is not advanced enough. But as a satisfier of the gigawatt-scale energy consumption of large data centers, I do not see a realistic future for hydrogen.
@everlaastia can probably correct the worst errors in the above, as they know this scene very well.
Bloom currently seems to sell mostly fuel cell plants to data centers, which are intended to secure energy supply. And those solutions are likely based on natural gas rather than green hydrogen.
Regarding those hydrogen applications, currently, vast amounts of grey hydrogen are used globally in fertilizer production (ammonia), oil refining, and the steel industry. I believe the first step in increasing green hydrogen globally will be in these applications—replacing grey hydrogen with green hydrogen locally.