Good Morning Team.
I’m semi on holiday but two recent RNS announcements for H-Power have dragged me back for a brief review. On their own, either would be a solid update.
Together, alongside what John Wilson told me in our recent interview, they tell us an interesting story about where H-Power is right now.
New readers should catch up on the full background first — the original AFC Energy moonshot piece from December, and the H-Power update from June covering the rebrand, the Protium hydrogen sale and the interim results.
This piece assumes you have that context and focuses on what’s changed since. (You can find everything in the archive).
Broker Upgrade
H-Power has appointed Canaccord Genuity as a third joint corporate broker, working alongside Peel Hunt and Zeus, effective immediately.
On the surface this reads as administrative housekeeping.
But companies don’t add a third broker — particularly one with Canaccord’s scale, research distribution and institutional reach — as a vanity exercise.
Brokers exist to distribute a company’s story to the investors who can move a share price - fund managers, family offices and institutions with serious capital rather than retail investors trading in the thousands of pounds.
Adding capacity here is a company preparing for a widening of the newsflow that needs to be sold into the market, or a capital markets event that needs proper institutional distribution.
Given where H-Power sits in its commercial calendar — CE certification, LC30 deliveries beginning in September, the first Hy-5 unit due before year end, and the S&P 500 partner reveal, which John Wilson has indicated will land earlier in the development process than originally planned (see below) — the newsflow explanation alone would justify the move.
Three brokers gives the company three separate institutional sales desks pitching the story simultaneously as the commercial story accelerates.
H-Power is preparing its capital markets infrastructure for a company that expects to be doing considerably more talking to institutional money over the next year than it has to date.
Komatsu - Ahead of Schedule
The second RNS confirmed successful completion of Phase 1 of the Komatsu Joint Development Agreement, and more importantly, the decision to proceed straight into the final phase, which now runs from September 2026 through to December 2027.
This means it’s moving faster than Wilson himself was willing to commit to when I spoke to him in mid-July.
When I asked him directly about the Phase 2 timeline in that interview, his answer was carefully hedged.
The programme was scheduled for roughly 18 months, he said, and whether anything would land before then was uncertain — his words were close to ‘I don’t know is the answer, but possibly, maybe.’
That caution was consistent with how he talks about every partnership - no promises beyond what’s contracted, because underpromising and overdelivering is the best way to operate with credibility regardless of sector.
Six months after the JDA was first announced in February, Komatsu has evaluated the Phase 1 output and elected to commit to the final, and most substantial, phase of the programme — a 16-month build-out and demonstration of H-Power’s ammonia cracker integrated directly with a Komatsu diesel engine platform.
The contract value remains modest at circa $2 million, and nobody should mistake this for a revenue event.
What it is, though, is a $43 billion listed industrial conglomerate looking at engineering data from a small AIM company and choosing to keep going rather than walk away — on a timeline faster than the company’s own CEO was prepared to guess at publicly.
In my interview, Wilson was explicit about why Komatsu matters beyond the headline contract value.
The titan had already sunk tens of millions of dollars into pure hydrogen engine research for its mining fleet and concluded the storage requirements were physically unworkable at that vehicle scale.
What H-Power is providing instead is a pathway to ammonia-hydrogen blended combustion — essentially a stock diesel engine converted to run on a blend of ammonia and cracked gas, using off-the-shelf components rather than bespoke engineering.
He connected this directly to what he sees as H-Power’s next major addressable market - primary power generation at megawatt scale, the same category currently being chased by companies like Bloom Energy at an $90 billion valuation using natural-gas-capable solid oxide fuel cells.
His view is that large ammonia engine generators, rather than fuel cells, will end up being the more economic route to that market for off-grid and primary power applications — and Komatsu is where that engineering knowledge is being built.
Reading the Interview Against Today
A few other threads from that July conversation land differently in light of today’s announcements.
On the S&P 500 partner, Wilson gave the most detailed public explanation yet of why the identity still hasn’t been revealed.
The original scope was a 4-tonne-per-day cracker for a single port-side application. Once the partner’s own commercial teams got involved, the ambition grew — first to 10-15 tonnes per day, potentially up to 20-30 tonnes, aimed at industrial customers needing roughly 20 megawatts of continuous power.
That scope expansion is why the announcement has been delayed beyond the original plan of revealing the name once the bespoke, larger-scale cracker was fully developed and designed.
The disclosure is now tied to reaching a commercial agreement and an initial order commitment — a point in the process that comes before that bespoke, larger cracker is actually built.
In that sense, disclosure would land ‘sooner than expected’ relative to the original benchmark, which was to wait until the whole development phase was complete. This is not a claim that talks have accelerated or that a deal is imminent - and nothing has been agreed to date.
But he also confirmed something not previously disclosed in this much detail - the partner’s own commercial team now views the Hy-5 as a sales enablement tool — a way to physically demonstrate decarbonisation to their own industrial customers before those customers commit to a large-scale cracker.
That is a partner actively building demand for H-Power’s product on H-Power’s behalf.
On diesel price parity, Wilson explained the mechanics behind the headline for the first time. Speedy’s own rental model — the same one they apply to diesel — shows cost parity with hydrogen across a usage band of roughly 50 to 100 kilograms per week.
Below that range hydrogen is cheaper; above it, the generator rental cost isn’t sufficiently offset by fuel savings. This is Speedy’s model, not H-Power’s marketing, which means that the company being priced against isn’t grading its own homework.
On the Protium hydrogen sale, Wilson laid out a three-part strategic rationale that goes well beyond the £10/kg headline.
First, it directly undermines years of UK government resistance to treating ammonia cracking as an established hydrogen production route — you cannot credibly call a technology nascent while commercially selling gas from it.
Second, and more pointedly, Protium is itself a recipient of HAR1 subsidy support, and it was more economic for them to buy unsubsidised hydrogen from H-Power than to produce their own subsidised supply — which is a fairly direct commentary on how the government’s own flagship hydrogen subsidy scheme is functioning in practice.
Third, it addresses what Wilson described as one of the more persistent commercial barriers the business has faced historically - customers worried about reliability of hydrogen supply and price volatility. Being able to point to a UK site producing its own hydrogen on demand removes that objection.
On CE certification and the LC30 rollout more broadly, Wilson’s framing was blunt - you cannot generate revenue without a certified, sellable product, and that product has now been built.
From September, H-Power can sell LC30 generators. The Speedy replenishment order and the TAMGO Saudi units are the first orders waiting behind that certification gate.
The Broader Investment Case
The problem H-Power is solving is real, not theoretical.
Hydrogen has been ‘five years away’ for three decades because of three structural barriers: it’s expensive to produce (electrolysis eats 50-55 kWh per kilogram, and in the UK roughly 70% of that cost is the electricity itself), it’s hard to transport (the smallest molecule in existence, requiring either 350-700 bar pressure or -253°C cryogenic storage), and government subsidy schemes designed to bridge the cost gap have consistently failed to pay out at the scale promised.
HAR1 committed over £2 billion in revenue support on paper; in practice, disbursement has lagged, and companies that built business plans around that support have burned cash waiting for it.
H-Power’s answer sidesteps all three problems rather than trying to solve them directly.
Ammonia is already the second most-traded chemical on Earth, produced at 180 million tonnes annually, with a century of existing global logistics infrastructure.
It’s 17.6% hydrogen by weight. Crack it on-site, at the point of use, and you get hydrogen without needing electrolysis, without needing pipeline infrastructure, and without needing subsidy.
At H-Power’s current cracking efficiency of roughly 9.5 kWh/kg — a figure the company says its latest architecture already beats, though a new number hasn’t been published — the input cost of hydrogen produced this way is somewhere around £4/kg before overheads, against a UK market price for delivered bottled hydrogen of £30-60/kg and a target customer price of £10/kg.
That gap is the commercial thesis.
The company isn’t betting on one product.
There are effectively five separate revenue engines, any one of which succeeding materially changes the financial picture, and several of which are already generating cash:
The Hy-5 portable cracker under a fuel-as-a-service model (recurring revenue, first unit at Port Clarence targeted for year end)
The LC30 fuel cell generator, now 85% cheaper to build than its predecessor and manufactured at scale through Volex, with a supply ceiling of 6,000 units a year representing roughly £570 million of annual revenue capacity if fully utilised
The large-scale industrial crackers through the S&P 500 JDA, targeting material revenue from 2027
The ICL joint venture, which sells hydrogen directly rather than just equipment
The Komatsu programme, opening a route into ammonia-fuelled internal combustion engines for heavy equipment, and by extension into large-scale primary power generation — a market currently being chased by companies like Bloom Energy at valuations in the tens of billions
The commercial validation is what separates this from the graveyard of hydrogen hopefuls.
None of H-Power’s partners are naive.
Speedy Hire, ICL, Volex, Komatsu and the still-undisclosed S&P 500 partner are all sophisticated commercial operators who conducted solid due diligence before committing capital and reputation. The Protium hydrogen sale in June was the first commercial bulk sale of hydrogen from cracked ammonia to a third party in the UK — sold to a company that is itself a recipient of subsidised hydrogen support, at a price where buying unsubsidised hydrogen from H-Power was still the more economic choice.
Management matters here as much as the technology.
CEO John Wilson and CFO Karl Bostock have a shared track record of turning around industrial businesses — Wilson took AIM-listed EKT from a £7 million to a £100 million market cap, and the pair took Bulgin from a 2-3% operating margin to 40% doing the same thing as competitors, just more efficiently.
Since joining in January 2025, they’ve delivered an 85% cost reduction in the fuel cell generator on schedule, signed the S&P 500 JDA, formed the ICL and Komatsu partnerships, brought in Volex as a manufacturing partner, and now added a third broker — a track record of hitting, and today, beating, their own stated timelines.
None of this removes the risk.
This remains an early-stage AIM company pre-material-revenue, dependent on multiple partnerships converting from development agreements into contracted, recurring orders, in a sector with a well-documented history of overpromising.
But the asymmetry that first drew me to this name in December is what makes today’s news worth writing about at all - a market cap still measured at £125 million against sector peers like ITM Power and Ceres Power valued closer to £1 billion each, despite H-Power having achieved something neither of them has — a commercial hydrogen sale, at a commercially viable price, without subsidy, today.
The Bottom Line
HPOW shares have been volatile over the past year — trading has ranged roughly between 8p and 18p, with the market cap moving correspondingly between around £90 million and £180 million depending on the day, so treat any single snapshot with caution.
What matters more than today’s tick is the direction of travel - every catalyst flagged in the original moonshot thesis has either landed or moved closer, and the market has still not settled on a valuation that reflects that.
The pattern worth watching is that H-Power keeps beating its own guidance rather than meeting it.
The catalysts I flagged in June remain the ones that matter most: CE certification, first LC30 deliveries in September, the Hy-5 at Port Clarence before year end, and the S&P 500 partner reveal whenever it lands.
Watch this space.