Authorities have welcomed a wave of interest in building Australia’s first commercial scale hydrogen projects.

More than $3 billion of renewable hydrogen projects are vying for funding from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA), after it opened the $70 million Renewable Hydrogen Deployment Funding Round to help fast track the development of renewable hydrogen in Australia.

ARENA has announced it received 36 expressions of interest (EOI) in the funding round, which is expected to play a significant role in supporting commercial-scale deployments of renewable hydrogen in Australia and commence the pathway to achieving the Australian Government’s goal of ‘H2 under $2’.

ARENA says it is aiming to support two or more large scale renewable hydrogen projects, with electrolysers of a minimum 5 MW capacity and with a preference for 10 MW or larger. These projects will be expected to be among some of the largest electrolysers in the world.

“We’re excited to see that there is such strong interest in renewable hydrogen from across a broad cross section of industry,” ARENA CEO Darren Miller said.

“This is an important step for the sector and it looks like we have many companies now ready to start building large scale renewable hydrogen projects across a range of industries and end uses.

“The fact that we’ve received expressions of interest for projects totalling over $3 billion in cost and almost 500 MW in size shows that we’re beginning to see companies embrace making hydrogen through renewable means,” he said.