The electrolyzer reckoning

Empty gigawatt factories, product recalls, participation rates that never materialised, and a policy environment that has now stripped the green premium entirely. The electrolyzer industry has had a brutal few years and most of the companies that raised hundreds of millions on the back of the hydrogen hype cycle are now sitting with fixed costs they cannot sustain and field deployments they are not proud of. 

Host Bridget van Dorsten speaks with Raveel Afzaal, CEO of Next Hydrogen, one of the few electrolyzer manufacturers that chose to watch from the sidelines while competitors scaled into the storm. Raveel describes the decision in blunt terms: in 2021, when cost of capital went to near zero and capital discipline evaporated, Next Hydrogen looked at the macro signals; rising inflation, rising interest rates, a market telling them their Hyundai partnership was worth a 5% share price drop, and chose to extend their runway from 18 months to five years. That meant hard capital allocation decisions, and the answer was to invest in the product, not the factory. 

 The conversation goes deep into a problem that rarely gets discussed publicly: the commercialisation valley of death. Getting to a working prototype is celebrated, but the productisation phase, technology readiness levels five through seven, is where the funding gap is most severe and the cost shock is greatest. Costs typically rise three to five times from prototype stage, revenues do not yet exist, and neither government programmes nor conventional investors are structured to bridge it. Raveel explains why so many companies that made it to prototype stage never made it to commercial deployment and what surviving that valley actually required. 

 Raveel also pushes back on a common framing around Chinese versus Western electrolyzers. His argument is that the quality question is not a national origin question , it is a materials question. What membranes, what bipolar plates, what catalyst, what functional safety architecture? Next Hydrogen's own answer to those questions is unusual: replacing nickel bipolar plates with large injection-moulded specialty engineered plastics, eliminating corrosion risk entirely and reducing cost through higher material utilisation rather than lower-grade materials. The company holds 40 patents on a cell architecture designed from the outset for direct connection to variable renewables, a design decision made in 2008, when the rest of the industry was still building for baseload. 

 The episode closes on what the next two to three years look like for electrolyzer manufacturers. Raveel's view is that consolidation is coming, but many companies won't survive long enough to be part of it, their fixed costs are too high and their runway too short. The companies that survive will be those with variable cost models, disciplined project selection, and a genuine answer to three questions: Can you access excess electrons? Can you deliver containerised, plug-and-play solutions that control total installed cost? Can you reliably handle the intermittent operations that direct renewable connection demands? Next Hydrogen is betting the answer starts with getting the cell design right first. 

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