By: Marco Raffinetti
Three years ago, Namibia was being talked about as the next great green energy frontier.
A sparsely populated country with world-class sun and wind poised to become a green hydrogen superpower.
Since then, the mood has cooled. Financial close on large-scale projects is taking longer because of slower market demand ramp-up and geopolitical headwinds. Has the opportunity come and gone for Namibia?
It hasn’t. The scale-up has been slower than the early hype promised, but the underlying fundamentals that position Namibia as a major emerging supplier remain unchanged. If anything, it has strengthened.
To understand why, it helps to look for the signal amongst the market noise, to the direction that the global energy system is actually heading.
The price gap is closing, not widening
Green hydrogen — produced by splitting water using renewable electricity — and its derivative, green ammonia, remain more expensive today than “grey” hydrogen made from natural gas or coal.
But the gap is narrowing steadily, driven by the same forces that made solar and wind the cheapest form of new electricity generation almost everywhere in the world – rapidly declining technology costs.
Analysts project Namibia’s production cost falling to ~$1.50 to $2.30 per kilogram of hydrogen as projects scale up.
This would place Namibian green hydrogen among the world’s cheapest producers.
The combination of Namibia’s exceptional renewable resources, low country risk, and strong government support makes for a very attractive proposition. Forecasting when cost parity will be reached is difficult and will vary by market and by how carbon is priced.
However, the critical point is that the trajectory is no longer in serious doubt. The question has shifted from “if” to “when,” and every year of cost declines in renewables and electrolyser manufacturing pulls this date closer.
Insurance against a volatile world
The case for green molecules was never just about price. It is also about resilience.
Countries that import hydrocarbons remain exposed to price spikes and supply disruptions triggered by wars, shipping chokepoints, and geopolitical rivalries — risks that have recently intensified.
China’s energy planners, for instance, have explicitly flagged disruption as a reason to accelerate green fuel development.
Domestically producible green molecules are a hedge against exactly this kind of shock.
For Namibia and its neighbours, most of which import refined fuels and, in some cases, natural gas, green hydrogen and ammonia offer a route to converting their abundant renewable resources into an energy commodity that doesn’t depend on imported energy.
That is a structural advantage no amount of near-term cost pressure erases.
Policy first, then economics — the same path renewables took
It is worth remembering that wind and solar did not become the world’s cheapest electricity because they were cheapest at the start.
They became affordable because targeted subsidies, mandates, and guaranteed offtake pulled enough capacity through factories and the scale-up of the rollout of new installations to drive costs down the learning curve.
Green hydrogen and ammonia are now walking the same path, albeit a step or two behind.
Government support — feed-in style subsidies, blending mandates, concessional finance, and strong government support to help establish the industry — is what gets the industry built while costs are still too high to compete unaided.
That support is necessary today.
But it is a bridge, not the destination. The end state, just as it now is for solar, wind, and batteries, is an industry that undercuts fossil incumbents on cost alone, at which point policy support becomes a rounding error rather than a prerequisite.
China’s bet, and what it signals
It is worth noting how differently this conversation is unfolding outside the West. In much of Europe and North America, decarbonisation has become entangled in a political and ideological argument.
It has become a debate about belief systems as much as engineering and economics. China has largely sidestepped that argument.
Beijing is not scaling up clean energy and green hydrogen solely because it has taken an ideological position on climate change; it is doing so because the cost trajectory and the resilience case are, to Chinese planners, simply obvious.
China leads the world in clean energy generation.
China produced more renewable electricity in 2025 alone than the entire European Union consumed across all sources. It did so by treating solar, wind, and batteries as industrial and strategic assets, not moral ones.
China is applying the same logic to green hydrogen.
Beijing has folded hydrogen support into its national Energy Law.
It has launched a pilot programme pushing green hydrogen into heavy industries such as steel and ammonia and embedded a 200-gigawatt electrolyser capacity target in its 2026–2030 five-year plan.
China’s National Energy Administration has framed green fuel development as a strategic priority for energy security, with operational green hydrogen capacity having more than doubled year-on-year.
None of this is driven by a domestic climate lobby; it is driven by the same calculus that made China the world’s dominant manufacturer of solar panels, wind turbines, batteries and electric cars.
Whoever masters the cost curve first captures the market, and whoever controls their own energy inputs is least exposed to the next geopolitical shock.
The parallel with China’s renewable energy and electric automotive scale-up is not accidental — it is the same industrial playbook, stripped of politics, applied to green molecules.
What this means for Namibia
Financing, offtake agreements, and infrastructure build-out remain genuinely hard.
But the fundamentals that made Namibia attractive remain unchanged, and the onward march of progress and technological innovation is inevitable.
As the industry scales and costs continue to fall, the countries with the best renewable resources backed by supportive government policies will lead in green hydrogen supply.
Namibia’s potential has not diminished; the timeline has simply turned out to be longer than first advertised.
Marco Raffinetti is the CEO of Hyphen Hydrogen Energy
