Can urban-level strategies foster nascent hydrogen industries?

Abstract

Many cities are developing strategies to foster rapid growth of the hydrogen industry for both environmental and economic benefits. Yet, the effectiveness of these strategies remains unclear. This paper addresses this gap. We extract the motivators and enabling factors of 21 frontrunner cities in China in implementing local hydrogen strategies. To examine whether frontrunner cities’ strategies lead to increased hydrogen industry development, a two-way fixed effects regression analysis is performed to the panel data of 19 frontrunner cities and 64 matching control cities during 2012-2021. We find that cities implementing hydrogen strategies saw increasing the number of firms, and, more tentatively, the investment scale. Our findings suggest cities can enable nascent hydrogen industry development, and have the potential to support broader energy system transition.