Mastering the Science of Hydrogen Technology with Enass Abo-Hamed | Conversations in Cleantech | Season four, Episode eight

Enass Abo-Hamed has been a passionate advocate for hydrogen and its role in decarbonisation from the earliest stage of the sector. Eight and a half years ago Enass was at Cambridge University studying for her PhD focusing on hydrogen storage and it was here that she developed the core idea for H2GO Power. During this time, Enass also meet her fellow co-founders and H2GO Power made the leap from the lab to the world of business

Fast forward eight years and the company is thriving! Having invested the time, money and energy in refining the core technology, the company is now at the deploying stage of its model. With industry partners lining up to work with them, H2GO Power is making waves across the sector. 

In this key takeaways article, Enass gives us an insight into the journey of H2GO, from its early roots to the challenges it faced getting investors to believe hydrogen technology was needed and what the future holds. 

If you would like to hear more from Enass, check out her full Conversations in Cleantech here. 

Could you start by giving us an insight into H2GO Power?

H2GO Power was founded around eight and a half years ago by myself, my co-founder Luke, and a couple of other co-founders when we were all PhD students at Cambridge University. 

The core technology was the intellectual property from my PhD and we’ve built the business around this. We are a hydrogen engineering business and a software business that develops and deploys hydrogen storage infrastructure. Through a partnership and collaboration model with industry, we focus on decarbonising major emitting and polluting industries. 

The second element of the business is a SaaS platform. We have built an end-to-end platform that allows the optimisation of decisions made in the cloud to better operate assets and get the most out of them. In my opinion, this tool is groundbreaking and has the potential to reduce the hydrogen dollar per kilogram.

How is H2GO Power different from other companies in the space?

We are a technology business first and foremost! A core value we have maintained over the years is technical excellence. 

Our goal has been to master the technology and continuously improve it by benchmarking it properly in the market. From there we have explored industrial applications, formed partnerships, and delivered projects at scale based on the very strong core technology. 

We’ve been able to do this because of the quality of people that we hire and the team spirit. We are all very tech-savvy. We measure everything we do, sometimes we may even overdo the measuring, collecting and analysing data but we know it works. 

If I was to say one thing that differentiates us, it is the strength of the technology and how we have converted that into a commercial product based on robust performance differentiators. 

What have been some of the challenges of growing a start-up?

I started H2GO Power during my PhD and I was trained to work and think as a scientist. As a scientist, you have to present your ideas in a certain way backed up by data and evidence. The idea is to show you have thought about everything otherwise you’re not a very good scientist. When I started the business, I was very much stuck in the mindset of accuracy rather than looking at potential. 

Whereas in the business world, they want to hear about how the idea has the potential to be revolutionary and make money. The hydrogen market at this time was pretty much nonexistent so that was a challenge but really the biggest challenge was being taken seriously as a scientist presenting a business idea. 

I knew early on if I wanted to scale the business, I would have to unlearn some of my scientific presentation skills and learn how to communicate as an entrepreneur pitching an idea.

The second challenge was overcoming people’s misconceptions of hydrogen. Many people associated hydrogen with failures of the past. Back in 2013/2014, no one wanted to invest in hydrogen. I remember some really hurtful comments from investors basically calling the idea stupid. Now I can look back and think how wrong they were but at the time it was very challenging to receive feedback like that and find the drive to want to continue. 

We established H2GO Power before the Paris Agreement and before decarbonisation conversion targets were in the mainstream conversation. At the time the financial markets and oil and gas were doing really well so people felt there was no need to talk about decarbonisation and where hydrogen could fit into this. 

With decarbonisation, whilst you solve that problem, you also provide a solution for a reliable and clean power supply. However, when we started it was such a challenge to convince anyone to back us because the market was just not there. 

Having said all that, things have changed drastically today so this is not really a challenge for the next generation of entrepreneurs. The need to decarbonise is widely recognised so there is a lot more help out there now such as impact funds or climate funds. There are an array of investment opportunities for cleantech entrepreneurs with cutting-edge ideas now. It is very positive and encouraging. 

What does the future hold for H2GO Power?

I feel like sometimes it is easy to dwell on the challenges rather than get too excited about what is ahead. 

We’ve invested so much time and energy optimising and scaling the technology and now it is out in the world. We’ve started to see large-scale commercial projects using our technology - some of them have been announced, others not yet but we’re very proud of all of them. 

We have industrial partnerships with collaborators who have been phenomenal to work with and truly understand the strength of the technology. They realise how we fit into their model and how we can transform their businesses. 

Whilst we’ll always be looking at optimising our technology, we’re no longer at the building stage, we’re now deploying it. You can expect to see a lot of our systems being deployed in many industrial applications across different countries - this has always been the type of growth I’ve wanted to see in our business and we’re finally getting to that point. 

Enjoyed this article? Listen to the full podcast here, and connect with Enass on LinkedIn to follow H2GO Power’s journey.