Viritech publishes call to action for hydrogen tech

Cleantech engineering company Viritech has published a call to action urging the UK government to prioritise investment in hydrogen technology.

hydrogen
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Viritech develops technologies including integrated hydrogen powertrains, vehicle control systems, structural graphene pressure vessels and high-performance energy storage to enable hydrogen application in automotive, aerospace, marine and distributed power generation.

Available here, the company's call to action outlines the UK’s opportunity to take a leadership position on development of clean hydrogen technology to power air, road and marine transport in line with the UK’s climate ambitions ahead of its hosting of COP26 this November.

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Timothy Lyons, Viritech's founder said: “As a nation, we have done a respectable job of not just pioneering lithium-ion technology and advancing battery tech, but our gigafactory potential is way behind other European markets such as Germany and France in terms of both timing and quantum; hydrogen offers the UK the chance to take a lead in an environmentally and economically critical technology, leveraging our amazing domestic capacity for automotive engineering ingenuity.”

According to the Hydrogen Taskforce Economic Impact Assessment, August 2020, investment in hydrogen technology has potential to unlock £18bn in GVA and create up to 75,000 UK jobs by 2035.

In a statement, automotive commentator Jay Nagley said that hydrogen powertrains will be the ‘key growth industry of the late 2020s’, commenting: “Batteries can not do the whole job alone and there are a large number of use cases, especially in heavy freight applications such as heavy goods vehicles, where batteries alone are not the solution to replace fossil fuels.

“However, a duel-track approach of hydrogen and batteries provides a comprehensive set of solutions to achieve this goal.”