H-Power

Tangible progress. The thesis is playing out.

Good Afternoon Team.

In December, I named AFC Energy as my Moonshot for 2026.

Since then, the company has rebranded to H-Power, changed its ticker to HPOW, and this morning released three simultaneous RNS announcements that represent the most significant commercial proof of concept in its 20 year history.

New readers will need the full context to understand why today matters.

This piece covers everything — the structural problem with hydrogen, the specific solution H-Power has built, the technology in detail, the management team, every partnership and what each one actually means, the financial position, the revenue pathway, today’s announcements and the valuation argument.

This is a long read. If you are seriously considering this company, you need all of it.

Why Hydrogen Has Failed For Thirty Years

Let’s start where most investment pieces on hydrogen don’t — why this sector has been so consistently disappointing, and why that history is essential context for understanding what H-Power is attempting.

Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe.

When used to generate power, the only byproduct is water.

It can replace diesel in generators, decarbonise industrial processes that cannot be electrified, fuel heavy vehicles, store renewable energy at scale and serve as a feedstock for industries that currently depend on fossil fuels.

The total addressable market runs into the hundreds of billions of dollars annually, and by some projections will exceed $1 trillion by 2050.

And yet, for decades, the hydrogen economy has been five years away.

The reason is not a mystery.

Nick Walker, H-Power’s Chief Strategy Officer, has spent 25 years as an investment analyst covering the hydrogen sector globally.

He’s written research on almost sixty fuel cell and electrolyser companies — private and public, across alkaline, PEM, solid oxide and AEM technologies.

He’s followed hydrogen policy since the early 2000s across the UK, EU, US, Japan and Korea. He sat through the 2000-2008 cycle of hydrogen excitement, watched the financial crisis deflate it, tracked the next cycle building from 2015 and exploding between 2019 and 2021, and watched that collapse too.

When I interviewed Nick in January, his diagnosis of why the industry perpetually fails was unsparing.

The UK has the highest industrial power costs in the world.

Parts of Northern Europe are similarly afflicted. Producing hydrogen via electrolysis — splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen using electricity — requires between 50 and 55 kilowatt hours of electricity per kilogram of hydrogen produced.

At UK industrial power prices, approximately 70% of the total cost of electrolytic hydrogen production is the electricity itself.

Before any subsidies, producing hydrogen from electrolysis in the UK costs somewhere between eight and 10 times the cost of natural gas. No industrial operator is going to pay that.

Not because they don’t care about the planet, but because the economics make it impossible to stay in business if they do.

And the subsidy schemes designed to bridge this gap have failed to deliver. The UK’s Hydrogen Allocation Round system — HAR1, HAR2, now building toward HAR3 and HAR4 — has committed substantial sums on paper. HAR1 alone delivered over £2 billion in revenue support commitments to eleven green hydrogen projects.

The problem, as Nick put it to me flatly, is that none of those subsidies have actually paid out. After four or five years of a subsidy system that has made promises, the disbursements are not happening.

Companies that built business plans around HAR support have been waiting, burning cash, and in some cases running out of runway.

The European picture is similar.

The IPCEI system provided significant capex subsidies. The European Hydrogen Bank offered opex subsidies of around 80 to 90 euro cents per kilogram. Neither was sufficient. For every project that reached Final Investment Decision in the last two years, five or six did not.

And even if subsidies did arrive at the promised levels, Nick made a deeper point that the cost of power is the primary cost of electrolytic hydrogen production.

Subsidies do not reduce the cost of power.

They offset some of the damage, but the underlying structural problem remains. In the offshore wind sector, subsidies worked because they drove manufacturing scale, which drove unit cost reductions — the turbines themselves eventually got cheaper to build.

That mechanism does not apply to hydrogen from electrolysis, where the ongoing operating cost is electricity, and nobody is reducing the cost of electricity.

The UK’s power costs are if anything moving upward, driven by grid investment requirements, Hinkley Point C construction costs, and the extraordinary spectacle of paying over a billion pounds a year to curtail offshore wind because the grid cannot absorb it.

(Yes, I have other plays designed to solve this issue).

Then there’s the infrastructure problem.

Hydrogen is the smallest molecule in existence. It leaks through almost everything. High-pressure storage requires 350 to 700 bar, while liquid hydrogen storage requires cryogenic temperatures approaching -253°C, at which point you lose 30 to 50% of the energy content just keeping it cold.

The EU hydrogen backbone is planned at 50,000 kilometres — 40% of today’s EU transmission network length. Roughly 3-4% of it has reached Final Investment Decision.

Project Union in the UK is at a similar pre-FID stage.

You cannot build demand for hydrogen without affordable supply, and you cannot justify building pipeline infrastructure without existing demand.

This circular argument is the key sticking point.

What you get when you add high power costs, unpaid subsidies and absent infrastructure together is an industry graveyard. Between 2019 and 2021, the UK’s two most prominent hydrogen stocks — ITM Power and Ceres Power — went from market caps of around £90 million each to £3 billion and £2.5 billion respectively, driven by legislative hope following Theresa May’s Net Zero 2050 legislation and an explosion of bullish agency forecasts projecting 600 million tonnes of global hydrogen demand by 2050.

By the lows of 2024 and early 2025, both had lost the overwhelming majority of that value. The hope had not been wrong about the destination, just wildly wrong about the timeline and economics of getting there.

This is the sector H-Power is operating in.

And its entire strategy is built around not needing the sector to fix itself.

Insight Into Change

John Wilson joined as CEO in January 2025.

He had looked at what was then AFC Energy four or five years earlier with an investor hat on, during the hydrogen bubble, and chosen not to invest.

He was designing next gen solar technology 20 years ago in Canada and seen firsthand how difficult it is to commercialise nascent clean energy technology even with a strong balance sheet.

He knew the failure risk.

When the opportunity came around again in late 2024, he saw something different. Not a technology requiring the world to change before it could work but a tech that could work in the world as it already exists.

His insight was this:

Ammonia is 17.6% hydrogen by weight.

It’s the second most traded chemical on Earth, produced at 180 million tonnes annually worldwide. It has established global supply chains built over a century of industrial use.

It can be transported in ordinary tanks at modest pressures. The infrastructure for ammonia logistics already exists everywhere that matters commercially.

If you can crack ammonia — break the nitrogen-hydrogen bond, releasing hydrogen gas and nitrogen — on-site, at the point of use, cheaply, rapidly and reliably, you have simultaneously solved all three problems that have kept the hydrogen economy perpetually frozen.

1. The cost problem - you are no longer dependent on UK electricity prices to produce hydrogen. You import ammonia from places where renewable power is cheap — Saudi Arabia, Oman, emerging green ammonia facilities across the Middle East and Asia — and crack it locally. The cracking process itself requires only a fraction of the power that electrolysis demands.

2. The infrastructure problem - you do not need hydrogen pipelines. You use the ammonia logistics infrastructure that already exists globally. Ammonia can be transported by ship, rail, truck and pipeline using equipment and regulations that have been in place for decades.

3. The economics problem - at H-Power’s achieved efficiency of 9.5 kilowatt hours per kilogram of hydrogen produced, the cost of electricity in the cracking process is marginal. With ammonia at approximately $400 per tonne — a reasonable spot price — the raw material cost translates to roughly £1.60 per kilogram of hydrogen. Add 25 pence per kilowatt hour for electricity, multiply by 9.5 kilowatt hours, and you add approximately £2.40. You’re at around £4 per kilogram before depreciation, amortisation and service costs. The target price to customers is £10 per kilogram.

The prevailing UK market price for bottled hydrogen delivered to site is £30 to £60 per kilogram, and often considerably higher.

The margin embedded in that price differential is the entire thesis.

H-Power is not trying to sell hydrogen at cost to prove a technology works.

It’s trying to build a profitable industrial business that delivers hydrogen at a price so far below market alternatives that customers choose it on pure commercial grounds, regardless of their sustainability commitments.

No subsidies. No carbon credits. No waiting for infrastructure.

Just cheaper, cleaner power.

The Technology In Detail

Before going further, you need to know what H-Power has built and why it’s different from what already exists.

Because yes, ammonia cracking is not new.

Topsoe, KBR and Casale have been building industrial-scale crackers for decades. Facilities processing hundreds or thousands of tonnes of ammonia per day exist and operate reliably every day. The chemistry — cracking ammonia over a catalyst at high temperature to produce hydrogen and nitrogen — is well understood.

What makes H-Power’s technology different is the application.

Those large-scale crackers are enormous, fixed, capital-intensive chemical plants costing hundreds of millions of dollars. They are designed for continuous operation at ports or large industrial sites, feeding hydrogen directly into adjacent pipeline infrastructure or industrial processes. They take years to build and commission, require months of steady-state operation to be economical, and cannot be moved.

They are completely unsuitable for a construction site in Surrey, a glass plant in Yorkshire or a data centre in the Midlands.

H-Power’s CTO Dr Mike Rendall and his engineering teams have spent years developing modular, containerised, decentralised cracking systems optimised for portability, rapid deployment and distributed operation.

John Wilson described their pilot plant, which has been running at the Dunsfold site for close to two years, as essentially a chemical plant in which the reactor is the size of a fire extinguisher.

That physical scale — achieving meaningful hydrogen production rates in a reactor small enough to be a component of a containerised, transportable module — required solving a series of engineering problems that large-scale industrial crackers never needed to confront.

The key challenge is thermal management.

To crack ammonia efficiently, you need to maintain precise operating temperatures within the reactor. In a giant fixed installation, this is achieved through brute force — enormous heat exchangers, massive thermal mass, continuous operation that allows the system to reach and hold steady state.

In a small modular system that needs to start up at room temperature, reach full operation in 20 minutes, and maintain efficiency while operating intermittently in varying ambient conditions, you need something a bit different.

H-Power’s solution — the specific details of which are protected through PCT patent filings with additional batches filed through 2025 — involves thermal dynamics that move heat with extraordinary efficiency through the system, maintaining reaction temperatures while minimising ongoing power input requirements.

Nick described it to me this way: the secret sauce is the very high quality thermal dynamics that enable the system to maintain heat and crack ammonia with very, very low power input on an ongoing basis.

This thermal efficiency is what produces the 9.5 kWh/kg figure.

For context, Nick cited ITM Power’s Neptune 5 electrolyser system, which has a published figure of 55 kWh/kg. H-Power’s cracker uses approximately one sixth of the power to produce the same kilogram of hydrogen.

In a country where 70% of electrolytic hydrogen production cost is electricity, that ratio is transformative.

The published 9.5 kWh/kg figure is itself already outdated. John Wilson confirmed to me in December that their current generation architecture is operating below that figure, that they have not yet put a new number into the market, and that they are continuing to drive it lower.

The S&P 500 partner’s Phase 1 due diligence specifically included detailed cost-per-molecule modelling, and John noted that H-Power surpassed the expectations that partner had going into that analysis.

Beyond efficiency, the other key characteristics of the technology include:

• Rapid start-up - the cracker reaches full operation within 20 minutes from room temperature. Previous architectures required several hours. For portable applications — construction sites, temporary power, vehicle refuelling — a three-hour warm-up time is commercially unworkable but 20 minutes is operationally viable.

• Modular, containerised design - the Hy-5, H-Power’s flagship product, is a plug-and-play containerised module. No site construction, no complex installation, no civil engineering required. Deploy it, connect ammonia supply, start producing hydrogen. When finished, move it to the next location. This is architecturally different from everything that exists at industrial scale.

• Hydrogen purity - the Hy-5 produces hydrogen at 99.97% purity, certified to ISO 14687 Grade D fuel cell grade standards. Today’s Protium sale confirms this purity level in commercial operation. This purity is sufficient for PEM fuel cells without additional purification steps that add cost and complexity.

• Durability - ammonia is a corrosive substance. Material selection for components that will be in contact with ammonia over an 8 to 10-year operating life is critical. H-Power’s material choices, and the catalysis technology inside the reactor that handles the actual cracking reaction, are both areas with significant IP protection.

The H-Power LC30 fuel cell generator — the demand side of the equation — is also key. This product converts hydrogen to power in the field, and has undergone a transformation as complete as the cracker.

The previous-generation S-Series generator was, in John Wilson’s own words, ‘a work of art.’

It also had 10,000 components, required a supply chain of extraordinary complexity, cost over £355,000 to build, and had an operating temperature range of -5°C to +40°C that excluded significant portions of the global market.

Building 50 of them would have required H-Power to manage a supply chain of automotive complexity with a balance sheet that is a rounding error on the automotive industry.

The new LC30 achieves 85% lower manufacturing cost, 50% mass reduction, 45% volume reduction, 95% fewer components, 20% greater efficiency, and an operating range of -20°C to +50°C that covers every commercially significant deployment geography on earth.

It uses a single commercially available 30kW fuel cell from the market — the same fuel cell stack that has accumulated 3.5 million hours of operating history and carries a 15,000-hour warranty — rather than twelve individual 2.5kW fuel cells with bespoke control systems and balance of plant for each.

The skid it sits on is an off-the-shelf commercial size rather than a bespoke fabrication. The principle applied across every single line item on the bill of materials: what is the nearest standard commercial component that meets the specification, rather than building everything to a bespoke design?

The Ford Model T of hydrogen generators, as it were.

John described the previous approach — and he was being generous about the engineering achievement it represented — as analogous to deciding you don’t like any cars on the market, so you design your own car to your own specification and then try to create a supply chain around it.

The only person who has pulled that off recently is Elon Musk, and Musk had hundreds of billions of dollars and exceptional luck.

H-Power had neither.

The 85% cost reduction was achieved on schedule, below budget, in 10 months. That investor who called John a liar on a public call when he committed to a 66% reduction target has not been heard from since.

Manufacturing is now handled through a partnership with Volex, a £1.1 billion revenue global contract manufacturer with facilities across multiple countries.

Build time is 85 hours per unit.

The supply ceiling from the current Volex arrangement is 500 fuel cells per month — 6,000 units annually.

At £95,000 per unit, that is £570 million of annual revenue capacity sitting in the supply chain, waiting for customer demand to unlock it.

Management Team

Management quality is the single most important differentiating factor between technology companies that commercialise and those that don’t.

John Wilson is, by his own description, on his last major CEO role. He has been frank with me when he tells himself this psychologically, because it puts him in a position where he makes decisions because they are right rather than because they are safe for his career.

His track record is concrete.

He ran AIM-listed EKT — Electron, a conglomerate of seventeen small businesses with limited strategic fit — for almost a decade, taking it from a £7 million market cap to over £100 million through a combination of turning around viable businesses, shutting non-viable ones, and relentlessly simplifying.

He then worked with CFO Karl Bostock at Bulgin, which they took from a 2-3% operating margin business to a 40% operating margin business, selling the same products as every competitor but doing so in a fundamentally different way.

These are industrial manufacturing operators who understand supply chains, unit economics, working capital and what it takes to scale.

When John talks about cutting your cloth accordingly and running the business as if it’s his own money, it’s not a platitude — he and Karl bought a material number of shares when they joined, and participated in the July 2025 fundraise with £500,000 of their own capital.

The first months of his tenure at H-Power tell you everything you need to know about how he operates. He arrived in January 2025, conducted a strategic review, and within months had cut the headcount, consolidated facilities, generated £1.5 million in annualised savings, paused the existing Speedy JV deployments, redirected engineering resources toward the 85% cost reduction program, signed the S&P 500 JDA, formed the ICL JV, brought Volex in as manufacturing partner, and delivered the first LC30 unit on time and below budget.

All of this while managing a company that was publicly listed on AIM, communicating with shareholders, running due diligence processes with multiple industrial partners simultaneously, and navigating the CE certification process for a new product.

Nick Walker brings a different but equally important capability. 25 years of hydrogen sector analysis means he has seen almost every failure the industry has produced.

He knows which technology claims are credible and which are marketing. He knows how subsidy schemes actually work versus how they are presented. He also knows the difference between a commercial relationship and a letter of intent.

And crucially, after all of that, he chose to join H-Power rather than continue writing research about it.

John told me that Nick knows more about this industry than he himself would ever know, and that having Nick in conjunction with Chief Commercial Officer Petteri Hyytiäinen building out the commercial function gives him people in the background constantly working through which verticals to prioritise, which customers to target and what price points the market will bear.

This is the front end that the business lacked before January 2025, and is the thing that will turn the tech into revenue.

Partnership Architecture

What distinguishes H-Power from the hundreds of hydrogen companies that have raised capital and failed is the quality and depth of its commercial partnerships.

These are not useless MoUs with government agencies or speculative collaborations with friendly startups. They’re contractual commercial relationships with sophisticated industrial operators who have conducted serious technical and commercial due diligence.

Taken together, they represent independent validation of the technology, the economics and the commercial model from multiple directions simultaneously.

S&P 500 JDA

In June 2025, H-Power announced a Joint Development Agreement with an undisclosed S&P 500 industrial company to develop industrial-scale ammonia crackers. The partner is reimbursing H-Power’s development costs throughout the program and phase 1 has been completed successfully.

The scale of what this partnership represents is easily missed if you read it too quickly. This is a company with the resources to develop cracking technology entirely in-house, or to license it from Topsoe or KBR or any of the established industrial chemistry giants.

Instead, they spent several months conducting due diligence across every company globally that is developing compact ammonia cracker technology, evaluated the competitive landscape comprehensively, and concluded that H-Power’s approach was the most innovative, the most suitable for scaling and offered the lowest cost per molecule of hydrogen.

They then specifically validated the IP protection around the reactor technology. In the RNS announcing Phase 1 completion, H-Power noted that the partner had confirmed the protection provided by the intellectual property of their reactor technology.

This is a definitive statement about IP defensibility from a company that has been inside the technology and has strong incentives to understand exactly what is and is not protectable.

The original scope of the JDA was a 4-tonne-per-day cracker for a specific port-side application in Northern Europe. Since then, as the commercial teams on both sides have deepened their relationship, the scope has expanded.

Rather than one port-side use case, the application now extends to multiple industrial verticals inland — glass manufacturing, cement production, chemical processing, steel making.

Industries that require 20-30 megawatts of continuous power and have no viable decarbonisation pathway through electrolysis or pipeline hydrogen. The likely cracker size is now 10 to 15 tonnes per day rather than 4 tonnes.

Material revenues are expected from 2027. When I pressed John on whether we were talking millions or tens of millions, he declined to give a specific figure but pointed to the rule of thumb that electrolysers cost approximately £1 million per megawatt, that a 10-megawatt equivalent cracker applying that heuristic across multiple systems per year delivers a clear answer, and then said: ‘potentially it’s the latter, not the former.’

That’s a forecast wrapped in compliance language, but its meaning is not ambiguous.

John has also strongly indicated that the partner’s identity will be revealed sooner than the market expects, driven by the deepening commercial association rather than waiting for a formal contracted milestone.

When that name is announced, the re-rating will very likely be rapid. A named S&P 500 industrial giant publicly associating itself with H-Power’s cracker technology changes the investment conversation.

Komatsu

In February 2026, H-Power announced a Joint Development Agreement with Komatsu — a $43 billion market cap Japanese conglomerate, one of the world’s leading manufacturers of construction, mining, forestry and industrial heavy equipment, listed on the Tokyo and Osaka Stock Exchanges.

The initial contract value is worth circa $2 million, subject to milestone delivery, and the objective is to integrate H-Power’s proprietary ammonia cracking technology with a Komatsu diesel internal combustion engine, demonstrating that you can run a diesel engine on liquid ammonia with minimal modification.

The backstory makes this more significant than the headline number suggests.

Komatsu had already spent tens of millions of dollars investigating pure hydrogen engines for their giant mining trucks — vehicles with engines costing between $750,000 and $1 million each.

They ruled pure hydrogen out because the storage requirements are physically impossible at that vehicle scale. This next attempt at decarbonising their fleet uses ammonia-hydrogen blended combustion, with H-Power providing the cracking technology. H-Power had already demonstrated the concept on a 250-kilowatt Volvo engine, and the results from that demonstration were part of what persuaded Komatsu to proceed.

Komatsu’s CTO publicly stated that they envisage H-Power’s ammonia cracking technology as potentially playing an important role in fulfilling their sustainability goals.

A $43 billion company does not put its CTO’s name on a public statement like that without reason.

The strategic importance extends beyond the contract value. This validates that the cracker technology has commercial value entirely independent of the fuel cell generator business.

The cracker enables internal combustion engines, industrial process heating, pipeline filling and fuel cells. Every new application vertical that the cracker enters multiplies the addressable market and the range of potential commercial outcomes.

Speedy Hire — Speedy Hydrogen Solutions JV

Speedy Hire is one of the UK’s largest equipment rental companies, with a nationwide network and deep customer relationships across construction, infrastructure and industrial markets.

The 50:50 joint venture provides H-Power with direct access to the UK construction sector without needing to build a sales force from scratch, negotiate onto approved vendor lists or establish credit relationships with major contractors.

H-Power delivered 20 of the previous-generation S-Series generators into the JV, generating £4 million in FY24 revenue.

The strategic pause on further deployment in 2025 — to achieve the cost reduction that would make commercial deployment genuinely competitive — was agreed with Speedy.

Both partners recognised that deploying at economics that were three times the cost of diesel would slow rather than accelerate adoption.

Speedy Hire is not an altruistic organisation.

They agreed to the pause because they believe in the long-term commercial opportunity and wanted to deploy technology that could actually win in the market.

This morning’s interim results confirm that the Speedy JV has received a replenishment order for 15 LC30 units, subject to CE certification which remains on track for August. More importantly, the results state that the JV is expected to meet, if not exceed, target utilisation of generators by October 2026, with a commercial offering at price parity to diesel.

That final phrase deserves to stand alone.

Price parity with diesel.

In the field.

With real customers.

In 2026.

This is the milestone that H-Power’s entire commercial strategy has been pointing toward since John Wilson arrived.

Not cheaper-than-diesel-if-you-count-the-carbon-tax or competitive-with-subsidies.

Actual price parity, on a total cost of ownership basis, against the incumbent technology that every construction site in the UK currently uses.

The London Gateway depot agreement adds further weight. Speedy is opening an H-Power depot within its flagship London Gateway facility to serve anticipated demand from infrastructure projects.

London Gateway is one of the largest construction and infrastructure project corridors in the UK. This is aggressive preparation for volume.

ICL — Industrial Chemicals Group JV

The 50:50 joint venture with Industrial Chemicals Group Limited, one of the UK’s largest independent chemical manufacturing and distribution companies, operates on a different model than the Speedy JV.

Rather than selling or deploying generators, this JV produces and sells hydrogen directly — using ICL’s ammonia procurement and logistics capabilities alongside H-Power’s cracking technology to create a vertically integrated green hydrogen supply business.

ICL is a sophisticated industrial chemicals operator. They understand exactly what ammonia costs at commercial volumes, what hydrogen can be sold for in various industrial applications, and what margin looks like at different utilisation rates and price points.

They would not have entered a 50:50 joint venture if the unit economics didn’t work.

The commercial model is straightforward. Import ammonia at commodity prices — ICL’s existing procurement relationships and chemical logistics capabilities provide access to competitive pricing.

Crack it to produce hydrogen using H-Power’s technology. Sell the hydrogen at commercially disruptive prices that are still highly profitable, given the yawning gap between production cost and market price.

The pilot cracker at H-Power’s Dunsfold site — producing up to 400 kilograms per day — is already generating revenues, and today’s Protium sale was made under the permit revision that allows hydrogen sales from that plant.

The ICL JV’s first Hy-5 deployment at Port Clarence targets November commissioning. At 70% utilisation and £10 per kilogram, a single Hy-5 unit generates approximately £1.28 million in annual recurring hydrogen revenue.

Port Clarence is the first of what both partners anticipate will be multiple deployments across ICL’s UK site network.

This structure gives H-Power something most equipment companies never achieve — direct participation in the ongoing economics of hydrogen production and sales, not just the one-time revenue of selling a cracker. And the FaaS model generates recurring revenue that compounds as deployment scales.

Volex

Volex is a £1.1 billion revenue global contract manufacturer with production facilities across multiple countries and an annual spend of £600-£700 million. Their involvement in manufacturing the LC30 at scale solves what would otherwise be H-Power’s most acute scaling problem.

Building hundreds or thousands of fuel cell generators requires manufacturing infrastructure, supply chain depth, quality systems and process engineering capability that a HPOW cannot efficiently build from scratch. Volex brings all of that, and the 85% cost reduction in the LC30 was achieved in part through the supply chain leverage and manufacturing process engineering that Volex contributed.

The current supply ceiling under the Volex arrangement is 500 fuel cells per month — 6,000 units annually. At £95,000 per unit, that is £570 million of annual revenue capacity.

Volex is a very significant operation. Supply will follow customer demand, not constrain it. John made clear that their focus is entirely on converting the growing pipeline into contracted orders, because supply is not the bottleneck.

TAMGO — MENA Distribution

The exclusive distribution agreement with TAMGO — The Machinery Group LLC, a Zahid Group company — covers seventeen countries across the Middle East and North Africa.

TAMGO was established in 1991 and provides industrial machinery products and services across construction machinery, portable power, power generation, fire and water, compressed air, material handling and mining applications.

This morning’s third RNS announced the sale of two LC30 generators to TAMGO for field-follow performance trials in Saudi Arabia, followed by customer demonstrations across the GCC.

The LC30 will undergo testing under Saudi operating conditions, specifically including the hottest periods of the year. Its operating range of -20°C to +50°C was designed for this kind of extreme environment deployment.

The Saudi context matters.

Saudi Arabia is investing hundreds of billions in economic diversification and energy transition under Vision 2030. The Kingdom’s construction and infrastructure development activity is enormous, and the government has made explicit clean energy commitments. TAMGO has direct relationships with customers across all of these sectors, built over more than 30 years.

The previous Aramco generator trial demonstrated the technology in the region. The field-follow program with two LC30 units is the next formal step.

Upon successful completion, both H-Power and TAMGO believe this has the potential to unlock significant LC30 revenues across Saudi Arabia and the wider GCC.

And the addressable market in MENA runs into the billions of dollars.

UK Ammonia Alliance

One further strategic dimension that deserves mention: in October 2025, H-Power’s CTO Dr Mike Rendall was appointed inaugural Chair of the UK Ammonia Alliance, a newly formed industry group with eleven founding members including Air Products, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and Statkraft.

The Alliance held its first parliamentary event in late 2025, launching a policy paper calling for supportive UK government policy around the ammonia-to-hydrogen economy.

H-Power has direct input into policy formation at a critical juncture — the UK government is in the process of developing its updated hydrogen strategy, and the Ammonia Alliance is positioned to influence the regulatory framework, funding mechanisms and deployment standards.

Being at the table when policy is written is valuable in ways that do not immediately show up in revenue forecasts.

Regulatory frameworks around ammonia handling, hydrogen purity standards, permitting processes and clean energy incentives will shape the commercial environment H-Power operates in for the next decade.

Having the founder of the most credible decentralised cracker technology in the UK chairing the industry body that shapes those frameworks is not a coincidence.

This Week’s News

Three RNS announcements on the same day.

It must be Christmas.

Protium Hydrogen Sale

H-Power has signed a contract to sell 5,000 kilograms of fuel cell grade green hydrogen, produced by its pilot ammonia cracker at Dunsfold, to Protium — one of the UK’s leading green hydrogen companies.

This is, per the RNS, the first commercial sale of bulk hydrogen to a third-party customer from cracked ammonia in the UK.

The hydrogen is produced from bio-ammonia, classified as green hydrogen, at 99.97% purity to ISO 14687 Grade D — PEM fuel cell grade.

5,000 kilograms is enough fuel to run an LC30 generator at full rated power continuously for more than 100 days. This is not a token purchase.

Protium has also entered into a 12-month agreement, extendable by mutual consent, to use H-Power’s Dunsfold facility as a virtual depot for their South East operations.

Protium’s hydrogen storage and logistics assets — including multiple cylinder packages — will be stored at Dunsfold, filled with hydrogen produced from the ammonia cracker, and used as a regional distribution base expanding Protium’s delivery capability across the South East.

Protium is one of the UK’s leading green hydrogen companies. They operate three production sites and four distribution hubs nationally.

They have experience sourcing, handling and distributing hydrogen commercially. They have every reason to be rigorous about the quality, reliability and cost of hydrogen they integrate into their supply chain.

They chose H-Power’s cracked ammonia hydrogen.

The government commentary in this RNS is also meaningful.

Emma Hardy, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at DEFRA, is quoted explicitly, saying that H-Power’s sale demonstrates the new innovation needed to protect the environment while building a more resilient hydrogen supply.

Dr Jo Nettleton, Chief Regulator at the Environment Agency, is also quoted, describing H-Power as a pioneering project helping accelerate the path to net zero.

Ministers and regulators quote themselves into commercial hydrogen RNS announcements only when they are confident in the technology, the operator and the optics.

Interim Results

Revenue of £253,000 in the half year to April 2026, against £17,000 in the same period last year and £125,000 for the full year to October 2025.

Modest in absolute terms, but the trajectory matters. The business is moving from a standing start on revenue, and the foundations being laid now are what drive the step-change in H2 FY26 and beyond.

The more important financial story in the interims is the cash position and burn rate. Cash absorbed by operations fell to £7.5 million in H1 FY26 from £10.7 million in H1 FY25, despite a significant increase in capitalised development spend from £3.1 million to £4.0 million.

The business is both spending more on product development and spending less on operations — which means the efficiency drive is working.

Total cash available at the period end, combining £8.2 million in cash and equivalents with £9.2 million in short-term investments, stands at £17.4 million. The £3.2 million of R&D tax credits expected in H2 brings available liquidity to approximately £20.6 million. At under £1 million per month burn rate, that is runway to well beyond September 2027.

Inventory at April 2026 stands at £7,000 — effectively zero — compared to £1 million at April 2025 and zero at October 2025.

This is consistent with the transition to the new LC30 model and the Volex manufacturing partnership. H-Power is not carrying inventory risk; product is being built to order through a contracted manufacturing relationship.

Capitalised development costs have risen from £7.5 million at April 2025 to £13.5 million at April 2026. This represents the substantial engineering investment going into the Hy-5 product development, the LC30, and the S&P 500 JDA work.

When these products reach commercial deployment and start generating material revenues, that capitalised cost sits on the balance sheet as an asset rather than flowing through the P&L. The loss after tax of £5.8 million in H1 FY26, against £10.1 million in H1 FY25, reflects both the efficiency improvements and the capitalisation accounting.

The ammonia pricing commentary deserves some attention as well. The RNS notes that since the escalation of the Iran conflict, grey ammonia prices have risen by up to 60% due to natural gas feedstock exposure.

Green ammonia, anchored to fixed-cost renewable energy rather than gas, has risen by only around 5%. Green ammonia from Asia is currently quoted at a lower price than grey ammonia.

This is a structural tailwind for H-Power’s FaaS economics arriving just as they’re preparing to deploy Hy-5 units commercially. The inputs to H-Power’s hydrogen production are becoming cheaper relative to fossil fuel alternatives, not more expensive.

The operational highlights section of the interims confirms the commercial momentum building across every part of the business simultaneously.

The Speedy JV replenishment order of 15 LC30 units, subject to CE certification. The London Gateway depot agreement. The Speedy JV expected to meet or exceed target utilisation by October 2026 at price parity to diesel.

Growing interest from multiple parties for long-term Hy-5 deployments. The S&P 500 partner continuing strong engagement, with the Hy-5 now expected to be used as a sales enablement tool to demonstrate ease of decarbonisation to the partner’s industrial customers.

The Komatsu JDA progressing. CE certification on track for August.

Every line of that summary reflects execution, not aspiration.

TAMGO LC30 Sales

Two LC30 generators sold to TAMGO for field-follow performance trials in Saudi Arabia and customer demonstrations across the GCC. The units will be tested under Saudi operating conditions, including the hottest periods of the year — the most demanding thermal environment they are likely to face commercially.

As noted above, the operating range of -20°C to +50°C was specifically designed to cover this.

TAMGO’s General Manager Rami Elayan is quoted referencing the successful deployment of fuel cell technology during the Extreme E and Extreme H events in Saudi Arabia in 2025, framing the LC30 acquisition as the next step in their efforts to introduce hydrogen-powered solutions to the Kingdom.

This is a company that has already seen the technology work in a demanding showcase environment and is now taking the formal steps to commercialise it with their established customer network.

Upon successful completion of the field-follow programme, H-Power believes this partnership has the potential to deliver significant future revenues from LC30s across Saudi Arabia and wider GCC countries.

Again, the TAM lives in the billions.

Valuation Argument

H-Power currently trades at approximately 13p per share, with a market capitalisation of roughly £145 million. That is up from the <9p entry point I wrote about in December, but the market is still pricing this company for modest success at best.

To understand how anomalous that valuation looks in context, consider the other two significant listed hydrogen companies in the UK.

ITM Power is, even after recent weakness, worth closer to £1 billion.

Ceres Power has had an even more dramatic run, rising from as low as 50p per share to as much as 850p last month, and even after the drop retains a market capitalisation of roughly £1.2 billion.

ITM recently secured a £46.5 million grant from the UK Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) alongside a £40 million investment from Great British Energy.

Ceres is raising £100 million.

I’m not going to delve into their tech or investment cases; ultimately there is space for everyone to win here.

But H-Power has delivered something that neither ITM nor Ceres has achieved: a commercial hydrogen sale, from a proprietary cracker, to a third-party customer, at a commercially viable price, without government subsidy, in the UK, today.

It has a replenishment generator order from its JV partner with diesel price parity confirmed in field deployment. It has JDAs with a $43 billion industrial conglomerate and an unnamed S&P 500 partner whose Phase 1 due diligence confirmed best-in-class technology.

It has a manufacturing partner with £1.1 billion in annual revenues, a chemical company JV partner producing and selling hydrogen, and exclusive distribution across seventeen MENA countries.

At £145 million market cap against basically £1 billion apiece for its sector peers, that relative valuation is very difficult to rationalise on the merits.

And the bottom line for me is this: the bond market is going to force governments the world over to make cuts. ITM and Ceres are relying on massive, capital-intensive infrastructure (electrolysers) or long-term IP licensing (fuel cells).

These are multi-billion-pound market opportunities but have long lead times and are highly sensitive to policy changes on subsidies, interest rates and borrowing.

When the cuts come, the positioning is going to feel uncomfortable.

Revenue Pathway Analysis

Here’s where the growth comes from:

Hy-5 FaaS Revenue

The Hy-5 economics are the foundation.

Each unit produces up to 500 kilograms of hydrogen per day. At £10 per kilogram and 70% utilisation — a conservative assumption that accounts for maintenance windows and demand variability — a single unit generates £1.28 million in annual recurring revenue.

The FaaS model means H-Power retains ownership of the unit and charges customers for hydrogen consumption on a take-or-pay basis, with minimum consumption provisions that guarantee recovery of capital cost.

10 Hy-5 units deployed at 70% utilisation generates £12.8 million in annual hydrogen revenue. 25 units generates £32 million. Fifty units generates £64 million. 100 — not an aggressive target for a product with multiple serious industrial partnerships in place and a growing pipeline of enquiries — generates £128 million in annual recurring revenue.

This is not difficult maths.

The Hy-5 is on track for deployment by end of calendar year 2026 - we know this because the ICL JV’s Port Clarence deployment targets November commissioning.

The interim results confirm growing interest from multiple parties for long-term Hy-5 deployments. The S&P 500 partner is now using the Hy-5 as a sales enablement tool to demonstrate decarbonisation pathways to their industrial customers — meaning the partner’s commercial team is actively creating demand for Hy-5 deployments as part of selling the larger industrial cracker proposition.

LC30 Generator Revenue

At £95,000 per unit through direct sales, and at rental rates through the Speedy JV, the LC30 generator fleet creates a parallel revenue stream.

The Volex supply ceiling of 6,000 units annually represents £570 million of annual revenue capacity. The bottleneck is entirely commercial, not operational.

The Speedy JV replenishment order of 15 units, TAMGO’s two-unit purchase for GCC trials, and the pipeline of direct enquiries building behind CE certification all point toward accelerating volume in H2 FY26 and into 2027.

At relatively modest volume — 500 units deployed annually — the LC30 revenue stream alone runs into the tens of millions.

Industrial Cracker Revenue

The S&P 500 JDA is the revenue variable that most materially changes the scale of the opportunity in 2027 and 2028. John’s electrolyser cost-per-megawatt heuristic implies that a 10-megawatt equivalent industrial cracker is valued at approximately £10 million using that pricing comparison.

The scope expansion from 4-tonne-per-day to 10-15 tonne-per-day systems, across multiple industrial verticals, means the revenue per unit is higher than initially contemplated.

Even very modest industrial cracker delivery volumes — five units in 2027, ten in 2028 — would represent £50 million and £100 million in revenue respectively from this partnership alone, before any other revenue stream.

Those are again, not aggressive assumptions for a commercial relationship where Phase 1 is complete, scope has expanded and material revenues are explicitly targeted from 2027.

The Komatsu JDA adds an additional industrial pathway. If the diesel engine integration demonstration succeeds and progresses to commercial discussions, the addressable market in heavy construction and mining equipment decarbonisation is both global and enormous.

ICL JV Hydrogen Sales

The ICL JV structure means H-Power participates directly in hydrogen sales economics rather than only in equipment sales.

At Port Clarence, a single Hy-5 unit at 70% utilisation generates £1.28 million annually, of which H-Power captures 50% — approximately £640,000 per unit per year from a JV deployment.

As the JV scales across ICL’s UK site network, this becomes a meaningful recurring revenue stream.

Combined Revenue Trajectory

Putting these streams together, the pathway to £200 million in annual revenue by 2028 requires Hy-5 deployments scaling to 50 to 100 units, industrial cracker deliveries from the S&P 500 partnership reaching meaningful volumes, LC30 generator sales building through Speedy, TAMGO and direct channels, and ICL JV hydrogen sales compounding as more sites are brought on.

None of those targets individually requires exceptional performance - the aggregate of all of them delivering is what produces the step-change.

At £200 million revenue and a 5x revenue multiple — conservative for a high-growth industrial company with significant recurring revenue from FaaS and JV hydrogen sales — that implies a £1 billion valuation.

That’s your moonshot.

Wider Structural Tailwinds

Everything I’ve discussed above operates against a backdrop of structural market forces that are moving in H-Power’s direction, independent of anything the company itself does.

Global green ammonia supply is scaling.

Bloomberg projects that 92% of new ammonia supply added between 2024 and 2030 will be low-carbon. At least 428 unique low-carbon ammonia production facilities have been announced globally.

The IEA projects ammonia production will rise by almost 40% by 2050. Major green ammonia facilities in Saudi Arabia, Oman, Australia and elsewhere are at various stages of FID and construction, with the first serious volumes of low-carbon ammonia expected on the market between 2027 and 2030.

As green ammonia supply scales, the input cost to H-Power’s cracking economics falls. The business becomes more competitive, not less, as the market it depends on matures.

And today’s interim results already demonstrate this dynamic in early form — green ammonia from Asia is currently quoted below grey ammonia prices, decoupled from the natural gas volatility that has sent grey ammonia prices up 60%.

The UK government’s policy framework continues to evolve in H-Power’s direction. The July 2025 Hydrogen Update explicitly recognised hydrogen’s role in hard-to-electrify industrial sectors.

The National Wealth Fund has committed at least £5.8 billion across five clean energy sectors including low-carbon hydrogen. HAR2 awards are expected imminently, HAR3 launches basically now.

The Hydrogen to Power Business Model launches this year. And the Industrial Strategy names hydrogen as a key growth sector.

H-Power does not directly receive HAR subsidies, and its business model explicitly does not require them.

But every pound the government commits to building the hydrogen ecosystem creates demand for hydrogen that H-Power can serve profitably without subsidy. The government is doing the market creation work but H-Power is building the technology to serve that market commercially.

Catalysts Inbound

The series of events that would accelerate the re-rating are clear and near-term.

CE certification for the LC30 arrives in August. Immediately thereafter, the 15-unit Speedy replenishment order and the TAMGO two-unit sale can be fulfilled.

Customer deliveries begin in September and October. At that point, H-Power moves from a company that has announced generator orders to a company that is delivering them.

The S&P 500 partner identity revealed.

John Wilson has strongly hinted this comes sooner than the market expects. The moment that name is public, the investment community will reassess what a JDA with H-Power means in terms of technology validation and commercial potential.

This is the single announcement most likely to drive an immediate and significant share price re-rating.

Hy-5 deployment at Port Clarence in November. The first commercial-scale Hy-5 unit operational within the ICL JV, producing up to 500 kilograms per day and generating recurring hydrogen revenue.

This is the proof point that takes the FaaS model from theoretical to demonstrated.

Hydrogen sales scaling at Dunsfold. The Protium agreement covers 5,000 kilograms from the pilot plant. As more hydrogen is sold commercially from the site — and as the virtual depot relationship with Protium develops — recurring commercial hydrogen revenues build through H2 FY26.

Komatsu Phase 2.

A successful Phase 1 delivery leading to Phase 2 JDA announcement would confirm that H-Power’s cracker technology can be integrated with internal combustion engines at commercial scale, opening the heavy equipment decarbonisation vertical formally.

North American market entry. The LC30’s UL certification for North America is in progress alongside CE.

North America is the world’s largest equipment rental market.

Several of the major contractors there have made net-zero commitments that require hydrogen-compatible solutions. The infrastructure in Canada and parts of the US for ammonia logistics already exists.

The Bottom Line

When I wrote the original moonshot piece in December, I described H-Power as sitting in the uncertain zone between not yet proven and obviously successful, and said you were being offered pre-success pricing on something that might be post-success reality inside of a year.

Six months later, the dial has moved:

• The UK’s first commercial bulk sale of hydrogen from cracked ammonia.

• Price parity with diesel confirmed in field deployment with Speedy.

• LC30 sales into Saudi Arabia for customer trials.

• S&P 500 partnership scope expanded to multiple industrial verticals with a 10 to 15 tonne per day cracker.

• Komatsu JDA signed.

• CE certification on track.

• Cash runway extended to September 2027.

• Green ammonia pricing decoupling from grey.

• Government ministers and regulators publicly endorsing H-Power’s technology.

Every major milestone has been hit or beaten. Every major partnership has deepened. The management team has executed consistently against commitments.

This technology works in commercial deployment and the economics work without subsidy.

The asymmetry that attracted me to this investment in December is stronger today than it was then. The technology and commercial risks have reduced materially as proof points have accumulated.

We’re just getting started.