A growing number of cities across Europe is developing hydrogen strategies, either for mobility applications or for decarbonising their local and peri-urban industries and hard-to-abate sectors. By acting as experimentation and innovation hubs, these cities can be testbeds for the energy transition, balancing decarbonisation with competitiveness and social cohesion.

Project results are expected to contribute to the following expected outcomes:

• Investments in - and deployment of - hydrogen applications and infrastructure for hard-to-abate sectors in and around cities to mitigate local air pollution and lead to economic growth and jobs, bringing urban environments at the forefront of sustainability and innovation.
• Communities of practice to foster the interaction between stakeholders from cities, ports, industry, local and regional government, as well as researchers and citizens.
• Enhanced synergies between the Climate-Neutral and Smart Cities Mission and the Horizon Europe Clean Hydrogen Partnership.

The selected project is expected to establish ‘twinning’ of Hydrogen Valleys (in particular those that have elements relevant for cities or ports) with cities that are interested to decarbonise their local and peri-urban hard-to-abate sectors using hydrogen and to improve air quality. Focus should be on hard-to-abate and/or hard-to-electrify sectors, such as industrial uses, heavy-duty and long-distance transport, aviation, maritime uses, or any combination thereof. The use of hydrogen for heating purposes is out of scope.

Twinning will help cities to access the best available expertise and tools that can enable them to identify and implement decarbonisation strategies based on renewable hydrogen. To foster cooperation between cities and Member States, it is encouraged that there is a geographical balance between the participating authorities to foster learning from different projects and approaches.

This twinning should be based on mentor-mentee pairings; these could also target enlargement countries, such as the Western Balkans, Ukraine, and Moldova.

The project is expected to:

• Organise a selection procedure (for example in the form of public calls for expression of interest) to identify the most promising twinning pairs that will be selected to develop collaborative activities;
• Develop and implement for each twinning pair a tailor-made set of collaborative activities;
• Deliver for each twinned city a detailed roadmap outlining the future steps to integrate renewable hydrogen in their industrial decarbonisation;
• Facilitate the interaction between participating cities to address shared challenges and solutions;

Collaborative activities can address for example:

• Feasibility assessments (including technology choices, sources of renewable hydrogen, business cases, regulatory issues and stakeholder engagement);
• Designing a detailed implementation plan (including funding strategy, permitting, infrastructure requirements, supply chain integration);
• Environmental and socio-economic impact assessment;
• Sharing best practices and lessons learned;
• Education and training.

At least one of the cities selected for twinning is expected to be one of the 112 cities selected for the EU Mission on Climate-Neutral and Smart Cities^[1]. The project is expected to enhance the synergies between the Horizon Europe Clean Hydrogen Partnership and the EU Mission on Climate-Neutral and Smart Cities by making optimal use of the information available through the Hydrogen Valley Platform^[2] and the Cities Mission Platform^[3]. Under the guidance of the Cities Mission Platform, the selected project will engage in clustering activities with other relevant projects supported under the Cities Mission to promote synergies and complementarities. Proposals should ensure that appropriate provisions for activities and resources aimed at enforcing these synergies as well as clustering activities are included in the work-plan.

This action supports the follow-up to the July 2023 Communication on EU Missions assessment^[4].

[1] The EU Mission on Climate-Neutral and Smart Cities aims to deliver 100 climate-neutral and smart cities by 2030 and ensure that these cities act as experimentation and innovation hubs to enable all European cities to follow suit by 2050. On 28 April 2022, the Commission announced the 100 EU cities that will participate in the Mission. In addition, 12 cities have been selected from countries associated or expected to be associated the Horizon Europe programme.

[2] Mission Innovation Hydrogen Valley Platform

[3] NetZeroCities

[4] COM(2023) 457 final and SWD(2023) 260 final