Fuel Cell Europe welcomes the Strategic European Energy Review and thanks the European Commission for its leadership in addressing the different aspects of the challenge Europe faces to provide European citizens and businesses with safe, clean and affordable energy to ensure their sustainable development.

In its Strategic Energy Technology Plan the Commission extracts some important and relevant facts and views produced by the industry-led Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technology Platform. To meet its objectives, the Strategic Energy Review states that some technology push instruments should help accelerate technology development. It mentions Joint Technology Initiatives and “possible examples of such large-scale initiatives, which are beyond the capacity of any single country, […] are fuel cells and hydrogen”.

While we support the Strategic Energy Review’s aim to have a market penetration of hydrogen fuel cells in the 2030 time horizon, the Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technology Platform foresees the start of a mass-market roll-out of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles representing up to 1.8 million vehicles in sales as soon as 2020. Before that, it is anticipated that stationary and portable fuel cell applications will have been deployed massively across Europe.

Thus, we urge the Commission and Members States to make a firm, ambitious, and unambiguous commitment to hydrogen and fuel cell technologies as part of its European energy policy and in particular its Strategic Energy Technology Plan.

Energy is one of the biggest businesses in the world and is on the verge of massive change. The development and deployment of hydrogen and fuel cell technologies will create substantial growth opportunities and high quality, knowledge based employment both for the local market and technology transfer to help developing countries meet their huge anticipated increase in energy demand cleanly, and efficiently.

We trust the European Commission and Member States will seize this opportunity and take the right decisions to enable the deployment of hydrogen and fuel cells that will foster investment from the private sector, sustainable economic growth and better life for European citizens in the decades to come.

Fuel Cell Europe brings together a wide variety of European fuel cell companies, innovative SMEs, energy companies, automobile manufacturers and researchers. As the industry’s voice, Fuel Cell Europe’s mission is to accelerate the research and deployment of world-class European fuel cell technologies for applications in transport, stationary and portable power. Fuel Cell Europe is established as an activity of the World Fuel Cell Council e.V. Brussels’ office: 44 rue des Palais, B-1030, Brussels.

The Strategic European Energy Review is downloadable at: http://ec.europa.eu/energy/energy_policy/doc/01_energy_policy_for_europe_en.pdf