Stefan:
Ein Whisky mit Charles
H-Power
Einrichtung abgeschlossen; jetzt zu den Ergebnissen.
Charles Archer
Fakten über Wasserstoff
Guten Morgen, Team.
Im Dezember letzten Jahres war mein Pitch für AFC Energy, das jetzt unter dem Namen H-Power firmiert, gleichermaßen einfach wie gewagt.
Ein Unternehmen mit einer Marktkapitalisierung von 100 Millionen Pfund an der AIM behauptet, es habe gleichzeitig die drei Probleme gelöst, die die Wasserstoffwirtschaft drei Jahrzehnte lang „in fünf Jahren“ zurückgehalten haben : Kosten, Transport und Energieintensität.
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Die Antwort darauf war, nicht länger zu versuchen, überall Wasserstoff herzustellen, sondern Ammoniak direkt am Einsatzort, vor Ort und bedarfsgerecht in Wasserstoff zu spalten.
Ammoniak ist, anders als Wasserstoff selbst, leicht zu transportieren – es ist die zweithäufigst gehandelte Chemikalie der Welt und wird in gewöhnlichen Tanks über eine Infrastruktur transportiert, die bereits vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg existierte.
Die Argumentation lautete: Wenn man es lokal aufspaltet, umgeht man das gesamte Pipeline-Problem und benötigt dabei nur einen Bruchteil des Stroms, den die Elektrolyse erfordert.
Die wichtigste Zahl war 10 Pfund pro Kilogramm, geliefert ohne Subventionen, auf einem britischen Markt, wo abgefüllter Wasserstoff üblicherweise 30 bis 60 Pfund pro Kilogramm kostet.
Kombiniert man dies mit einem Brennstoffzellengenerator, der so umgestaltet wurde, dass 85 % seiner Herstellungskosten eingespart werden konnten, war das Ziel, die Gesamtbetriebskostenparität mit Diesel zu erreichen – der eigentliche heilige Gral der dezentralen sauberen Energieversorgung, erreicht durch Wirtschaftlichkeit und nicht durch CO2-Zertifikate oder einen staatlichen Scheck, der möglicherweise nie ankommt.
Neun Monate sind keine lange Zeit im Leben eines Industrieunternehmens, aber sie reichen aus, um eine Geschichte anhand ihrer Versprechen zu überprüfen.
Genau das versucht dieser Beitrag.
Die erste Hälfte ist eine unkomplizierte Darstellung dessen, was tatsächlich geschehen ist, die zweite hingegen ist anders – fundierte Spekulationen darüber, wohin verschiedene lose Fäden führen könnten.
Was wurde tatsächlich erreicht?
Der grundlegendste Test für jedes junge Industrieunternehmen ist, ob es das tut, was es angekündigt hat, und zwar ungefähr in dem von ihm angekündigten Zeitrahmen.
Gemessen daran war die Erfolgsbilanz von H-Power seit Jahresbeginn ordentlich, und in einigen Bereichen war sie sogar besser, als das Unternehmen selbst zu versprechen bereit war.
Beginnen Sie mit dem Rebranding, schon allein deshalb, weil es die sichtbarste und am wenigsten substanzielle Änderung ist.
In May, AFC Energy formally became H-Power, with shareholder approval secured at the April AGM and the new ticker HPOW taking effect from the 13th.
On its own this is corporate housekeeping - a company can call itself whatever it likes. But the timing is worth noting. The rebrand landed at the point where the business had, for the first time, a commercial product story to tell rather than a legacy alkaline fuel cell narrative that no longer described what the company actually did.
The more substantial story is the cost reduction on the fuel cell generator, because this was a number management put a stake in the ground on early and then had to be held to.
Back when the turnaround began, Wilson and CFO Karl Bostock set a public target of cutting the manufacturing cost of the fuel cell generator by roughly two-thirds.
This was met, by Wilson’s own account, with open scepticism from at least one institutional shareholder on a call - he recalls being called, in not so many words, a liar and an idiot for suggesting it was achievable.
The actual outcome, delivered with the LC30 in January, was an 85% cost reduction, comfortably ahead of the original target.
The redesign also delivered a 50% reduction in mass, a 45% reduction in volume, and a drop in component count from roughly ten thousand parts to a couple of hundred.
The operating temperature range was widened from a fairly narrow band to -20 through to +50 degrees Celsius, which is the difference between a product that can only be deployed in temperate climates and one that can go to Scandinavia or Saudi Arabia without modification.
That widened operating range turned out to matter almost immediately, because it underpins the TAMGO relationship in the Middle East.
In June, H-Power signed to sell two LC30 units to TAMGO, the Zahid Group’s machinery arm and H-Power’s exclusive distribution partner across seventeen MENA countries, for field-follow trials in Saudi Arabia.
The trials are structured to run across the country’s most extreme seasonal conditions - the hottest summer months and the cooler winter period - because a generator that fails in fifty-degree heat is not a generator TAMGO’s customers can rely on.
Alongside the trials, TAMGO has committed to running a program of product demonstrations and marketing activity across Saudi Arabia and the wider Gulf Cooperation Council, building on H-Power’s earlier track record supplying fuel cells to the Extreme E and Extreme H off-road racing series in the region, where the units reportedly ran at full uptime in conditions about as hostile to sensitive equipment as exists outside a laboratory stress test.
Back in the UK, the most important relationship remains the joint venture with Speedy Hire, and the news here has moved in the right direction on every front.
In June, alongside the interim results, Speedy placed a replenishment order for fifteen LC30 units for the Speedy Hydrogen Solutions joint venture, conditional on the LC30 receiving CE certification.
The two companies also agreed to open a dedicated H-Power depot within Speedy’s flagship London Gateway site, a piece of physical infrastructure investment that only makes sense if both parties expect sustained volume rather than a one-off pilot.
The interim results further stated that the JV was expected to meet, if not exceed, its target utilisation of generators by October 2026 (next month), on the back of a commercial offering priced at parity with diesel under Speedy’s own rental model - a model, worth stressing, that belongs to Speedy and not to H-Power, which means the company being measured against diesel is not grading its own homework.
The conditional part of that Speedy order - CE certification - was resolved on 26 August, when TÜV SÜD, the German certification body, issued the Attestation of Conformity confirming the LC30 met the safety and performance standards required for the CE mark.
The company’s own language was that this arrived in August 2026, in line with the previously stated timetable.
That may sound like a small thing, but for a hardware company promising a delivery calendar built on a chain of dependent milestones, hitting a certification date exactly when you said you would is not nothing.
The certification is also the gate that unlocks actual commercial sales of the LC30 into Europe, and by extension what allows the Speedy order and the TAMGO units to move from signed contracts to physical deliveries.
If the Speedy relationship represents the deepest and most operationally advanced partnership, the Komatsu relationship is arguably the most interesting from a pure signalling standpoint, because of how it has evolved against management’s own stated expectations.
The joint development agreement, announced in February and worth a modest $2 million, set out to explore whether a stock Komatsu diesel internal combustion engine could be converted to run on a blend of ammonia and cracked gas using H-Power’s cracking technology - a different application from the fuel cell business, and one aimed squarely at heavy construction and mining equipment that has no realistic path to decarbonisation through batteries or pure hydrogen.
Komatsu had, by Wilson’s own account, already spent tens of millions of dollars investigating pure hydrogen combustion for its mining fleet and concluded the storage requirements were simply unworkable at that scale.
Ammonia-hydrogen blended combustion was their next attempt, and H-Power’s cracker was the enabling piece.
What makes the timeline notable is that when I interviewed Wilson in mid-July, I asked him directly how long the gap might be before Komatsu committed to the JDA’s more substantial second phase.
His answer was carefully hedged - the programme was scheduled for roughly 18 months and whether anything would land before then he genuinely didn’t know, offering only ‘possibly, maybe.’
Three weeks later, on 10 August, H-Power announced that Phase 1 had been completed successfully and that the two companies had agreed to proceed straight into the final phase, a build-out and demonstration running from September 2026 through to December 2027.
That’s a >$40-billion listed industrial conglomerate looking at the engineering data from a small AIM company and choosing to keep going, on a timeline faster than the company’s own CEO was prepared to publicly guess at only weeks earlier.
The contract value itself remains small and nobody should mistake this for a revenue event - but a large, sophisticated industrial partner accelerating past your own internal caution is a more credible form of validation than almost anything the company could say about itself.
The other first of the year arrived in June, when H-Power announced it had signed to sell 5,000 kilograms of green hydrogen to Protium, one of the UK’s established green hydrogen energy companies.
This was the first commercial sale of bulk hydrogen produced from cracked ammonia to a third party in the UK.
The sale was made possible by a permit variation from the Environment Agency, allowing H-Power to sell hydrogen produced at its Dunsfold pilot site to outside customers, with the hydrogen itself certified to 99.97% purity against the ISO 14687 Grade D standard suitable for PEM fuel cells.
Alongside the sale, the two companies agreed a 12 month arrangement - extendable by mutual consent - under which Protium would use Dunsfold as a ‘virtual depot,’ staging its own hydrogen storage and logistics assets there to extend its distribution reach across the South East.
Government and regulatory figures were quick to attach their names to the announcement, with DEFRA’s Emma Hardy and the Environment Agency’s Dr Jo Nettleton both providing supportive quotes about environmental permitting reform enabling this kind of innovation.
(While government grants are not needed, they are being handed out. Not just in hydrogen - look at Alkemy and Tunsgten West - the money’s being splurged.)
And underpinning all of this operational progress is a balance sheet that has, on the whole, moved in a reassuring direction.
The interim results for the six months to 30 April 2026 showed revenue of £253,000, up from £17,000 in the equivalent period the prior year.
The loss after tax nearly halved, falling to £5.8 million from £10.1 million the year before, driven partly by a substantial reduction in cash absorbed by operations, down to £7.5 million from £10.7 million, achieved despite capitalised development spending actually increasing to £4.0 million from £3.1 million.
Total cash available at period end stood at £17.4 million, down from £25.3 million at the previous October year-end, but with a further £3.2 million of R&D tax credit expected in the second half.
Combined with a monthly cash burn management has previously described as under £1 million, the runway question that dogged the stock a year ago - the fair concern that this was a company that might run out of road before its technology had a chance to prove itself commercially - looks, for now, to have been answered.
One further piece of housekeeping.
In August, H-Power appointed Canaccord Genuity as a third joint corporate broker, working alongside the incumbent Peel Hunt and Zeus.
Brokers exist to carry a company’s story to the fund managers and family offices who move share prices in meaningful size, as distinct from retail investors trading in the thousands of pounds.
Bringing in additional capacity here is at minimum consistent with a company that expects to be doing considerably more talking to institutional money over the year ahead than it has done to date.
Finally, there is the relationship that remains the largest genuinely open question in the entire story.
Who is this as yet unnamed S&P 500 industrial partner?
The original joint development agreement, signed in June 2025, was scoped around a four-tonne-per-day cracker for a single port side application.
Over the course of the past year, the ambition has grown considerably - first toward a ten-to-fifteen-tonne-per-day design, and potentially as large as 20 to 30 tonnes per day, aimed at industrial customers who need something in the order of 20 megawatts of continuous power for processes like glass manufacturing, cement production or steel making, none of which have a credible decarbonisation pathway through electrolysis or pipeline hydrogen.
The partner’s own commercial team has, per Wilson, come to view the Hy-5 - H-Power’s smaller, five-hundred-kilogram-per-day portable cracker - as a sales enablement tool in its own right, a way to physically demonstrate decarbonisation to prospective customers before those customers commit capital to a much larger installation.
That is, if the characterisation holds, a sophisticated industrial partner actively building demand for H-Power’s product on H-Power’s behalf, which is a different and more valuable thing than simply being a customer.
But as of today there is no name, no disclosed order, and no announced commercial agreement. It remains the single largest unresolved catalyst in the story, and is a potential firework under the share price when a deal/name comes out.
Taken as a whole, the pattern across the confirmed record is consistent.
On every milestone that carried a specific date attached to it - the cost reduction target, the CE certification timetable, the Komatsu phase transition, the first bulk hydrogen sale - H-Power has either met or beaten its own guidance.
But yes, the share price has fallen back close to where we started.
This doesn’t matter.
This management team, whatever one thinks of the broader hydrogen sector’s history of overpromising, is delivering.
Now for some speculation
Yes, this is a speculative stock, so why not.
These are my thoughts going forward.
The most immediate question concerns the Speedy exclusivity arrangement.
Utilisation targets for the joint venture have been guided toward October 2026, and the exclusivity terms underpinning the relationship are understood to run through to November.
If utilisation is met or exceeded as guided, the logical next step is some form of renewal conversation between the two parties.
But a bare renewal, on its own, would tell an investor very little. Speedy has no obvious commercial reason to lock in continued exclusivity in exchange for a token reorder - if the technology and the diesel-parity pricing are genuinely working at the network’s flagship depot, a renewal ought to arrive attached to a materially larger order than the 15 units already placed, plausibly well into the double digits at minimum, rather than a face-saving gesture designed mainly to keep the relationship alive on paper.
The number to watch, when and if that announcement comes, is the unit count behind it, not the mere fact of renewal.
A related and perhaps sharper point concerns the economics of the Protium sale.
The confirmed facts are that Protium - a company with its own hydrogen production and logistics capability - chose to buy from H-Power rather than expand its own supply, at a price that has not been publicly disclosed beyond the general characterisation of being commercially viable without subsidy.
It’s worth entertaining the possibility, and it is only a possibility, that the actual price sits meaningfully above the widely quoted £10-per-kilogram fuel-as-a-service headline figure.
If that turns out to be the case, the sale would still matter as a regulatory and logistics first proof that a permit variation can be secured, that the purity specification can be met, and that a sophisticated hydrogen company is willing to transact.
But it might be that H-Power’s margins are higher than you think right now.
On the S&P 500 partner, management’s own account of the disclosure trigger - a commercial agreement plus an initial order commitment, rather than completion of the larger cracker’s full design - suggests a lower bar than was originally set out when the relationship was first announced.
That could mean the eventual reveal arrives with something concrete attached - a named partner, a stated unit count, perhaps a contract value, rather than another iteration of the ‘engagement continues to deepen’ language that has characterised updates on this relationship for over a year.
If it does land in that form, it is difficult to see a more obvious re-rating catalyst left on the table for this stock.
Yes, there’s a reasonable chance the reveal takes another two or three quarters to arrive, and a reasonable chance that when it does land, the initial order is deliberately conservative - a handful of Hy-5 units serving the sales-enablement function Wilson has described, rather than the large-scale industrial cracker order that some in the market may already be pricing in.
Both outcomes would technically satisfy the reveal, and the market’s reaction to each would likely be quite different.
A final, more structural point concerns how much visibility investors will retain into the Speedy relationship as it scales.
As the joint venture increasingly interfaces directly with Speedy’s existing rental customer base, H-Power’s own granular data on end-customer demand, usage patterns, and realised pricing could become partially obscured behind the JV structure - the market may end up seeing only what Speedy chooses to disclose through H-Power’s own announcements, rather than clean, independently sourced usage and pricing data.
This is not evidence of anything being concealed; it is simply a structural feature of joint ventures in general.
But it seems clear to me that Speedy is putting its own customer base directly in touch with HPOW.
This can only be a good thing.
And then there’s diesel
Further.
H-Power’s whole proposition was diesel parity on economics alone, with no carbon credit and no government cheque. Since then, we may be eclipsing parity.
The Strait of Hormuz has been shut since the end of February, taking roughly a quarter of the world’s seaborne oil trade with it. Ukraine’s drones have been hitting Russian refineries, and Moscow has banned diesel exports through the end of October, which removes about one barrel in every nine from the global market.
Europe leaned on American cargoes to fill the gap, but now those are under pressure too.
The result is that France is running dry.
Right now, 16% of French service stations have run out of petrol or diesel, and Macron has called an emergency meeting.
In the US, retail diesel has passed $6.50 a gallon and stocks are at their lowest for this time of year since records began in 1982.
Washington even flirted with a diesel export ban before the White House denied it and stepped back. But the fact that a US president can publicly muse about keeping American diesel at home tells every buyer in the world that US supply is politically conditional.
Britain is not yet short of fuel. But diesel touched close to 198p a litre today, a four-year high, and the country now has four refineries where it once had nine.
Bild
That makes it a price-taker in a market that’s tightening.
The key detail is that this is not really a crude oil problem.
It’s a refining problem.
Die Knappheit wird nicht durch einen Rohölmangel, sondern durch beschädigte Raffinerien, gestörte Schifffahrt und eingeschränkte Exporte verursacht, und Prognosen deuten darauf hin, dass sich die Lage erst im nächsten Jahr bessern wird. Die EIA geht davon aus, dass die US-Destillatbestände bis weit in das Jahr 2027 hinein unter ihrem Fünfjahrestief liegen werden.
Genau da kommen die Kunden ins Spiel, die ich beschrieben habe.
Speedys Mietkunden, Komatsus Flotten für Bergbau und Bauwesen sowie die Glas-, Zement- und Stahlwerke, die rund um die Uhr 20 Megawatt benötigen – sie alle verbrennen Diesel und stehen nun vor einem Kraftstoff, der sowohl wesentlich teurer als auch wesentlich unsicherer in der Lieferung ist.
Manche werden gezwungen sein, auf Wasserstoff umzusteigen, da ein Standort ohne Tanker nicht betriebsbereit ist. Andere werden es als Vorsichtsmaßnahme tun. Eine kostengünstigere Option, die die Energieversorgung sichert, ist eine deutlich einfachere Entscheidung als die Wahl der Parität im Januar.
Energiesicherheit wird dadurch nicht länger nur als Thema der Nachhaltigkeit betrachtet, sondern als Bestandteil des Risikomanagements – und das ist ein viel überzeugenderer Grund, das Management zum Kauf zu bewegen.
Natürlich könnte man einwenden, dass auch Ammoniak ein Produkt aus der Golfregion ist. Der Iran stellte während des Konflikts die Ammoniakproduktion ein, Katar setzte sie aus, und die Düngemittellieferungen aus der Golfregion kamen zum Erliegen. Ammoniak ist jedoch ein Rohstoff, der in Dutzenden von Ländern hergestellt wird, während das Problem bei Dieselkraftstoff in einem Mangel an Raffinerien liegt.
Das ist ein Problem, das behoben werden kann, und das sieht man ja an der Diskrepanz bei den Preiserhöhungen.
Unterm Strich ist die Dieselpreisparität ein dynamisches Ziel, und jede Preiserhöhung an der Zapfsäule verbessert H-Powers Wettbewerbsposition, ohne dass das Unternehmen dafür etwas tun muss. Da Speedys Mietmodell preislich mit Diesel gleichzusetzen ist, vergrößert sich mit steigenden Dieselpreisen der Vorsprung des Joint Ventures.
Wollen Sie das Licht anlassen?
Die Lösung existiert bereits.
Vielen Dank fürs Lesen von „A Whisky with Charles“!
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