The Reality of UK Hydrogen Policy
Ask anyone actually working in the hydrogen economy what they think about UK policy and you’ll rarely hear a positive word. Speak to project developers, investors, or engineers, the people building real infrastructure, not just drafting policy, and the verdict is unanimous: we are falling further behind global leaders. Worse, there is precious little faith that our endless pilots and “consultations” will amount to anything more than political window-dressing.
And you have to ask: If the UK government is so reluctant to fund green hydrogen properly - or is simply opposed in principle - why bother at all? Poorly funded, small-scale projects aren’t going to lower costs or prove competitiveness. If all we’re after is a handful of pilots and ambitious targets, it would almost be more honest to spend nothing and focus national effort elsewhere.
The Economic Challenge
But here’s what nearly everyone agrees on: The UK government really only has one job in this sector and that is to bring the cost of hydrogen down to an economically useful level. Once that happens, the private sector will do the rest. Investors want to build; companies want to scale. But nobody is going to pile in when green hydrogen costs three times as much as the fossil alternatives and government funding is a fraction of what Germany, the USA, and even parts of Asia are putting up. Until clean hydrogen is economically viable, in other words, until policy makes meaningful scale possible, the market won’t move.
Yet we find ourselves in a classic “emperor’s new clothes” situation. There are a number of companies - and the trade associations that represent them - that depend, at least in part, on government funding. With livelihoods and future projects on the line, nobody is willing to speak truth to power. The entire sector is going along with the charade, everyone recognising the problem privately, but few willing to say so in public.
Meaningless pilots
There’s a peculiar British habit of trialling and piloting technologies that already work perfectly well elsewhere. Hydrogen buses? They’re carrying passengers in Europe and China. Green steel? Commercial sites are already running in Sweden and Germany, providing real data on cost and performance.
Yet in the UK, millions are spent to see “if it works here.” It’s as if we need a national pilot project for iPhone functionality in London because it was designed in California. Rather than learning from successful reference projects abroad, we seem determined to duplicate the groundwork - mistakes and all - even when others have already solved the challenges. If you want to know if a hydrogen bus works? Take a short flight, ride one, talk to the operators, bring home the lessons. There’s no value to obsessively re-inventing the wheel.
Hydrogen heating
Nothing illustrates British hydrogen hand-wringing better than the recent trials of 100% hydrogen as a domestic mains gas. For nearly a century, Britain’s own ‘town gas’ supplied by the gas grid was over 50% hydrogen. People cooked, heated water, and survived winters using it. We know that hydrogen works in a domestic setting because it always did.
So why the repeated urge to test hydrogen all over again, with more pilots and local demonstrations? Why spend millions proving what history already settled?
Nobody is suggesting converting the entire gas network to 100% hydrogen. But blending modest percentages into the current gas grid could cut emissions right now: instead we’re caught in an expensive, time-consuming loop of reinventing what was routine two generations ago.
Make hydrogen economic
This isn’t just a hydrogen story, it’s a parable for the entire UK net zero approach: risk-averse, underfunded, bogged down by process, and oddly resistant to learning from the rest of the world.
But it all comes back to that one job for government: make hydrogen cheap enough for the private sector to take over. That doesn’t mean there’s one magic price point—cost reduction is a stepwise process, with new applications enabled at each stage as prices come down. The first to benefit will be sectors where hydrogen is already close to competitive, like replacing expensive fossil fuels such as diesel in heavy transport. As costs keep falling, hydrogen becomes viable for even tougher, hard-to-abate sectors - eventually unlocking deep carbon abatement in steel, cement, and other heavy industries.
That requires proper funding and bold market mechanisms, not more half-measures and endless pilots. If the government isn’t willing to do what it takes to unlock real market-driven growth, maybe it’s time to stop pretending otherwise.
Because until hydrogen is truly economic, the UK will keep spending public money on nice-sounding but ultimately pointless trials, while competitors build industry and jobs, and cut emissions at a global scale.
