Since June 2026, Germany’s reformed greenhouse-gas reduction quota (THG-Quote) — the national implementation of EU RED III, adopted by the Bundestag on 23 April and cleared by the Bundesrat on 8 May — has done something new for Power-to-X: it puts a tradable price on every kilogram of renewable hydrogen. The mechanism, not the headline quota, is what matters for project economics.
The mechanism
Suppliers that place fossil fuels on the German market must cut the greenhouse-gas emissions of those fuels each year — now under a binding sub-quota for renewable fuels of non-biological origin (RFNBOs), meaning green hydrogen and its derivatives. They rarely produce that hydrogen themselves. Instead, a supplier of RFNBO-certified hydrogen — for example a hydrogen refuelling-station operator — generates a quota credit and sells it to an obligated party.
So every kilogram of green hydrogen carries two revenue streams: the energy it delivers, and a certificate for the fossil CO₂ it displaces. Each kilogram avoids roughly 12 kg of CO₂ in road transport, and that avoided CO₂ is what the certificate monetises. The credit is only valid for hydrogen that is EU-certified (for example via ISCC EU or REDcert EU), meets the EU rules on renewable-electricity sourcing, and — from 2027 — is open to on-site inspection.
The certificate’s value scales with a counting multiplier: RFNBO energy counts threefold until 2031, then steps down towards a factor of one by 2040.
What it is worth
H2 Energy’s calculation puts numbers on this. At a certificate price of €430 per tonne of CO₂, the revenue from selling the certificate is about €14.57 per kilogram of hydrogen in 2027, falling to about €4.86 per kilogram by 2040 — the decline driven by the multiplier stepping down, not by a weaker CO₂ price. On the demand side, H2 Energy projects Germany’s annual RFNBO-hydrogen requirement rising towards roughly 1.2 million tonnes by 2040.
In the early years, that certificate revenue can more than cover the cost of supplying the hydrogen — so an operator can lower the price at the pump and still earn a margin. That is why hydrogen can become the cheapest fuel: not because production got cheap, but because the quota attaches a second income to it.
Reality check
The per-kilogram figures are an industry calculation, not a fixed price — certificate values move with the quota market. And the strict certification and inspection rules, introduced to stop the fraud seen in the biofuel market, set a high bar for who can actually monetise the credit. The signal, though, is unambiguous: a large neighbouring market now pays, in hard certificates, for certified renewable hydrogen — a working template for defossilising hard-to-electrify transport.
The timing matters for Switzerland. The revised CO₂ Act in force since 1 January 2025 runs only to 2030, and the Federal Council is currently drafting the framework for the period after 2030. Germany’s quota shows one concrete way to turn a climate target into a priced, bankable demand for renewable hydrogen — and how far the next Swiss CO₂ Act will create a comparable pull for RFNBOs and their derivatives remains an open design question.
Power-to-X Congress Switzerland 2026
22 September 2026, 10:00–18:00, Kursaal Bern. Theme: «Reality Check with Net Zero». Co-organised by energie-cluster.ch and the Swiss Power-to-X Collaborative Innovation Network (SPIN), with partner Réseau H2 Suisse Romande. Register and find all details here.