Neese's claim is that green hydrogen will win the way solar won — on price, not on conscience. Ninety-eight per cent of the hydrogen industry consumes today is made with CO2-intensive power, and the incumbent steam-methane route emits roughly ten times more CO2 than the hydrogen it produces; fifteen years ago solar was not chosen because it was not the cheapest, and fifteen years later it is. Verdagy, spun out of Chemetry at Moss Landing in May 2021 with Neese as the last employee in, is building very large membrane cells — three metres square, 160 stacked like a deck of cards for twenty megawatts, ten of those stacks for a 200 MW plant inside under 70,000 square feet, every cell reporting a voltage that feeds a digital twin so a handful of people can run the site. His economics: under three dollars a kilo today against historically priced wind and solar, under five almost anywhere in the US, and in his personal view no reason it cannot go below two at scale without incentives — all before the Inflation Reduction Act's three-dollar credit, which in a single July turned a clear European lead into an American gold rush with not enough supply of anything. The Indian argument is sharper still: large integrated players already own the renewables and the transmission and are missing only the electrolyzer in the middle, and grid banking makes the country about as frictionless as it gets, where the US must be treated as several countries at once. Convert photons into ammonia, put it on a ship, and India stops importing energy and starts exporting its own sunlight.
Worth your time if you are
Industrial buyers weighing green hydrogen against grey
Indian renewable developers missing the electrolyzer in the middle
Climate-fund investors pricing hard-to-abate decarbonisation
Deep-tech founders scaling electrochemistry into plants
Policy watchers tracking the IRA's spillover into Asia
