Growth projections of hydrogen electrolysis worldwide with evidence from historical analogs and hindcasting

Reliably projecting growth of emerging technologies entering the market remains a key challenge for informing policy making on energy and climate change. We demonstrate and validate a new approach to probabilistically project growth of emerging technologies and we apply it to analyze how much hydrogen electrolysis could be installed worldwide until 2100. The new approach combines hindcasting-based evidence that we obtain from testing multiple historical analogs, growth models, and diffusion attributes, like technology capacities at take-off and saturation. For electrolysis, we find that European countries would contribute most to global growth by showing fastest growth rates in the next years. However, as projected growth depends highly on currently planned projects, selected historical analogs, and settings of diffusion attributes, confidence levels vary notably. A few other countries worldwide, specifically Australia, Canada, and Chile, could also contribute strongly to the global growth with large capacities in later years and become hydrogen exporters.