To promote hydrogen and fuel cells and to support policy makers it is necessary to analyse the status of technology and any existing installations and demonstration projects to more efficiently craft demonstration schemes and roadmaps that can build on and expand existing ‘nuclei’ of technology implementation. Especially the analysis of the success of these demonstrations is vital for the further planning.

The European FP6-Integrated-Project “Roads2HyCom”, which assesses and monitors hydrogen and fuel cell technologies for stationary and mobile energy applications, has completed a mapping exercise showing the location of existing hydrogen and fuel cell demonstrations, production sites, and infrastructure installations in Europe.

Clusters of hydrogen and fuel cell technology can be identified from these maps. It can further be assumed that they indicate the availability of technology and first success of local or regional dissemination efforts, but also the existence of regional expertise, co-operation or favourable rules and regulations. Ideally, for future, large-scale deployment projects, sites should be located close to each other as a large-scale uptake of hydrogen will most probably require industrial sources for the transition phase (see figure 1).

All these data are visualised in an online map for the information and support of stakeholders and decision makers and are also available to the general public on www.roads2hy.com. In a further step it is analysed if generic regional profiles using socio-economic data can be used to identify possible future sites for large scale demonstrations.