The HyLand competition is entering its second round: Ten new municipalities and regions were awarded HyStarter status this year. Applications may be submitted as of today.
With the HyLand competition, the Federal Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure (BMVI) is offering regions in Germany the opportunity to design or directly implement holistic concepts and thus establish hydrogen and fuel cell technology locally. This is done at three levels to restart the regions at the point of the level of their previous experience.
HyStarter regions are supported and accompanied by experienced advisers to create regionally integrated concepts to bring hydrogen and fuel cell technology into transport. The funding aims to motivate municipalities and regions in a targeted way to develop initial ideas for integrated hydrogen concepts, concretise and elaborate plans or implement these plans with the support of the federal government. A HyLand network guarantees the exchange of experience between all regions.
The application as a HyStarter region takes place through an expression of interest procedure. Local authorities, municipal companies and private companies, associations or citizens’ initiatives can announce their interest for their municipality or region. The application process is available here from 16/03/2021 to 14/05/2021.
HyStarters receive organisational and content-related advice for about a year, form a landscape of players on the ground (policy-makers, municipal businesses, industry, commerce, society) and develop initial concepts on the topic of hydrogen and fuel cell on the basis of renewable energies in transport, but also in the areas of heat, electricity and storage systems.
Following the positive experiences of the first competition round, the networking activities and the support of the regions will be continued and intensified by a consortium of companies under the conceptual and content-related supervision of NOW GmbH. The programme management association NOW GmbH and Project Management Jülich (Projektträger Jülich (PtJ)) are responsible for organising and running the competition.
Andreas Scheuer, Federal Minister of Transport and Digital Infrastructure: “We are continuing our successful regional funding programme ‘HyLand’ and are bringing hydrogen mobility to the whole country. The demand for hydrogen and fuel cell applications in mobility is huge in all regions of Germany, and we can feel this in the response to all the funding calls and project tenders. That’s why we are following up with a second round within the ‘HyStarter’ framework and once again supporting many municipalities in becoming hydrogen regions.”
Kurt-Christoph von Knobelsdorff, Managing Director (Chair) of NOW GmbH: “HyLand really drives hydrogen applications forward, because it involves local players and takes into account the often diverse regional conditions in terms of implementation. At the end of the process, every region receives a custom-made concept to create a hydrogen economy – from hydrogen generation to its use in the transport sector. We are very pleased that HyLand is now entering its second round.”
In addition to the group of HyStarters, HyLand also considers regions that have already had first experiences with integrating hydrogen technology or have even wanted to bring entire concepts to implementation phase. For these so-called HyExperts, a relevant competition phase is launching in the spring.
Further information:
Expression of interest form: www.now-gmbh.de/hystarter
Final conference on 25 March 2021