Our paper on contractual flexibility for Power-to-X projects was presented!

Recently, our paper, titled “Role of flexible contract design in unlocking power-to-x projects” was presented by Jimmy Brossier at International Conference on the European Energy Market (EEM), 2025, held in Lisbon, Portugal from 27-29 May 2025.

Jimmy worked on this topic as his Master’s thesis project at Technical University of Denmark (DTU), supervised by Lesia Mitridati in collaboration with myself and Tue Vissing Jensen from Vestas R&D.

The resulting publication (referenced below) examines the role that flexibility designed into hydrogen offtake agreements could play in unblocking power-to-x projects.

We often hear that “green hydrogen is a dead-end”. Indeed, such projects have suffered recent slowdown due to a number of geopolitical shifts impacting their financial viability. However, truth is that a 100% decarbonised society cannot exist without green hydrogen and its derivatives.

With that in mind, the approach proposed in this work leverages advanced asset modeling and optimization to inform financial agreements that could potentially help improve the economic feasibility of such projects in the future.

References

Role of flexible contract design in unlocking power-to-x projects

Jimmy Brossier, Lesia Mitridati, Anubhav Ratha, and 1 more author

In 2025 21st International Conference on the European Energy Market (EEM), 2025

Abs Bib PDF

Power-to-X is seen as a promising option for decarbonising hard-to-electrify sectors, yet its scalability is limited by challenges such as mismatched contractual expectations between suppliers and offtakers, hindering the path to final investment decision. Pricing flexibility into green hydrogen offtake contracts can address the intermittency of renewable energy and help address these issues. While flexible offtake contracts have been studied in the literature, their impact on economic feasibility has not been thoroughly investigated. We explore strategies to increase flexibility in green hydrogen contracts by proposing adaptive pricing structures that consider supply shortages, surpluses, delivery horizons, and hydrogen classifications. Our analysis shows that flexible offtake contracts improve the bankability of green hydrogen projects. By accounting for delivery variability and low-carbon hydrogen production, these contracts allow offtakers to better express their true need for delivery certainty, allowing to share the risk of renewable intermittency, thereby de-risking investments.
@inproceedings{brossier2025role, title = {Role of flexible contract design in unlocking power-to-x projects}, author = {Brossier, Jimmy and Mitridati, Lesia and Ratha, Anubhav and Jensen, Tue Vissing}, booktitle = {2025 21st International Conference on the European Energy Market (EEM)}, pages = {1--9}, year = {2025}, organization = {IEEE}, }