2024 Climate Tech Companies to Watch: Electric Hydrogen and its push to mass-produce a carbon-free fuel

Electric Hydrogen wants to address these issues by developing electrolyzers that have about 10 times the capacity of today’s standard devices while also being more affordable and efficient.

The company is already operating a pair of electrolyzer plants in California, including a one-megawatt facility in San Carlos and a 10-megawatt project in San Jose. In April, Electric Hydrogen opened an electrolyzer factory in Devens, Massachusetts, which will crank out its first line of 100-megawatt electrolyzers. The company also raised $380 million in funding in 2023 from backers including BP, United Airlines, and Microsoft, making it the first electrolyzer company to be valued at over $1 billion. 

Key indicators

• Industry: Hydrogen
• Founded: 2020
• Headquarters: Natick, Massachusetts, USA
• Notable fact: Two of the company’s three cofounders came from First Solar, a solar panel manufacturer that is also featured on this year’s list.

Potential for impact

To slow the pace of climate change, we need to drastically reduce our use of fossil fuels. Heavily polluting industries like fertilizer and chemical manufacturing are notoriously difficult to clean up. Fertilizer alone accounted for 2% of global emissions in 2022, according to a study published in Scientific Reports. It’s also tricky to eliminate emissions from certain types of transportation, including shipping and aviation, mainly because fuels can simply store more energy for a given weight than today’s batteries. 

It’s these sectors where hydrogen shows the most promise, because it can be made into fuel that produces only water vapor as a by-product. But it’s hard to make clean hydrogen cost-competitive with fossil fuels. 

Caveats

Electric Hydrogen will need to prove that its 100-megawatt electrolyzer systems can operate reliably at a low cost. To make low-emission hydrogen, the electrolyzers will need to use a lot of renewable energy, which may not always be available. In addition, Electric Hydrogen doesn’t share many details publicly about how its technology works, which makes it difficult to gauge the company’s claims and progress.