Hydrogen keeps showing up in national energy strategies for one blunt reason: batteries are good at storing hours of electricity, not the months of energy needed to get an industrial plant, a container ship or a cold winter through. Produced from renewable electricity via electrolysis ("green hydrogen"), it can be stored, shipped and burned or fed through a fuel cell later — at a real efficiency cost, which is exactly why the projects below are still pilots rather than the default.
Most hydrogen demand today is industrial — refineries, fertiliser plants, steel. But three forces are pulling hydrogen into city-scale projects specifically: ports and mobility hubs that need a liquid-fuel replacement for ships, trucks and buses that can't simply plug in; new residential districts built from scratch, where planners can lay hydrogen pipework alongside electricity from day one instead of retrofitting it later; and countries with abundant, cheap renewables far from where the energy is needed, for which hydrogen (or hydrogen-derived e-fuels) is the only practical way to export that energy at all.
This dataset currently tracks three hydrogen projects, each testing a different bet:
Two of the three sit in this dataset's Energy category; Woven City is filed under Mobility, since its hydrogen use is downstream of a mobility-first pilot rather than the headline itself — a reminder that hydrogen rarely stands alone as a category, it's usually a supporting layer under energy, mobility or district planning.
All three projects are still small relative to a city's total energy or fuel demand — that's the nature of a pilot. The honest open questions are the same everywhere hydrogen is tried: whether electrolyser costs fall fast enough, whether enough renewable electricity is genuinely spare to make "green" hydrogen green, and whether the pipeline and refuelling infrastructure gets built before demand does, or after. Watch the same three projects over the next few years for real answers, not projections.