India’s Ministry of New and Renewable Energy said on 29 October that 23 green hydrogen off take contracts have been signed since its National Green Hydrogen Mission opened in 2023, covering about 550,000 tonnes a year of hydrogen equivalent. Eighteen of those deals were signed this year. More than 70 per cent of the volume is destined for export, and the ministry expects the projects behind it to attract roughly 9.5 billion dollars.
Europe is on the buying end
Two of the names on that list are German. AM Green agreed to supply Uniper with 250,000 tonnes a year of green ammonia, and the same company was sole winner of the Asian lot in Germany’s H2Global auction, a contract worth at least 585 million euros over ten years with first deliveries expected in 2029.
European industry wanted cheap molecules. It’s finding them abroad.
The shortage is on the demand side
The IEA’s Global Hydrogen Review 2026 puts numbers on the problem. New offtake agreements (An offtake agreement is a binding contract where a buyer agrees to purchase all or substantially all of a project’s future output from the producer.) worldwide were roughly flat last year at about 1.7 million tonnes, and only around a fifth sit behind firm contracts. The rest are letters of intent and memoranda. The agency also cut the capacity it counts as committed or likely by 2030 from 10 million tonnes to just over 6 million, and warned that 22 million tonnes of announced pipeline will miss 2030 altogether unless investment decisions land by early 2027.
Supply is not the constraint. Installed electrolyser capacity doubled in 2025 to more than 4 GW, with China responsible for nearly three quarters of the new installations. The factories can build the stacks. What’s thin on the ground is anyone contractually obliged to buy the output.
The policy fix helps the sums, not the signature
Brussels is working on the cost side. Trade press reported this week that the Commission plans to postpone some of the production rules for renewable hydrogen, following the review of the RED III delegated act that AccelerateEU promised in April. Hydrogen Europe has asked for the grandfathering of additionality and hourly correlation to run to 2035, and reckons that in Germany’s case it could take up to 3 euros per kilogram off production costs.
That’s real money. It still doesn’t produce a buyer.
What a hospital has that a pipeline does not
H2Heat was designed from the demand end. The project is building a green hydrogen chain in Gran Canaria that finishes at a hospital run by the Canary Islands Health Service: a 0.5 MW alkaline electrolyser from Stargate Hydrogen, hydrogen storage, a 100 per cent hydrogen combined heat and power unit from 2G Solutions and an integrated heat pump, targeting around 372 kW of heat and 360 kW of power.
The load is the point. A hospital needs hot water and sterilisation heat on a Sunday in August. It doesn’t renegotiate volumes every quarter, and it isn’t going to move somewhere cheaper.
At half a megawatt this is a demonstrator, not a market. The sequencing is still worth copying: find the consumer who cannot switch off, then size the plant to them. Much of Europe’s hydrogen pipeline was drawn the other way round, and the IEA’s revisions show where that leads.