India announces bidders for country's first green hydrogen and electrolyser manufacturing subsidies

India’s government has published the list of bidders into its first auctions for green hydrogen and electrolyser subsidies — both of which are oversubscribed.

The green hydrogen auction is capped at 450,000 tonnes a year of production capacity, but has seen bids for a total of 553,730 tonnes a year.

A total of 13 companies submitted bids for the first technology-neutral “bucket” of the green hydrogen auction, capped at 410,000 tonnes a year.

However, for the second pot of funding, which offered support for up to 40,000 tonnes a year of biomass-based production pathways, only one company — state-owned Bharat Petroleum — has offered a bid, for a paltry 2,000 tonnes a year.

As this bucket is undersubscribed, the unawarded capacity will roll over to the other bidders.

Meanwhile, the electrolyser tender is set to support 1,500MW of annual manufacturing capacity and has received 21 bids for more than double this capacity at 3,428.5MW.

This auction is potentially more lucrative for companies, offering support over five years, starting at a maximum of 4,440 rupees per kilowatt of capacity sold and progressively lowering to 1,480 rupees.

The second bucket for the electrolyser auction, which ringfences subsidies for 300MW of Indian-developed technologies, is also far more competitive than the alternate pot of funding in the green hydrogen tender, with bids submitted for 486.5MW in total. This includes conglomerate Adani seeking to corner the full 300MW cap.

However, all bidders for electrolyser manufacturing subsidies have to ensure that 50% of their annual sales supported by subsidies will go towards domestic installations.

The companies are also expected to include a measure of “local value addition” to keep the supply chain based in India. This is expressed as a percentage of the difference between sale value of the electrolyser and value of imports, in order to ensure a minimum percentage of the sales value of an electrolyser is from locally sourced materials.